Adieu Mahfouz

It turns out that I read Palace Walk at a relevant time. Nobel Prize-winner (the first to write in Arabic) Naguib Mahfouz has passed away. He was 94 and had been ailing since a fall earlier in the summer. His death is a reminder to me that we may be losing a generation of authors that create sweeping, epic views of a place and time. The Latin American magical realist authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez are aging. Young English-language writers like Jonathan Safran Foer maintain the magic and sympathetic voice, but are often gimmickly; other novels, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, show society through a family's life but are harsher and more sarcastic in tone. I personally like empathy.

But back to Mahfouz. He essentially popularized the novel for Arabic audiences and brought Egypt to life at the same time. Some excerpts from the NY Times obit:

Mr. Mahfouz’s city was teeming Cairo, and his characters were its most ordinary people: civil servants and bureaucrats, grocers, shopkeepers, poor retirees, petty thieves and prostitutes, peasants and women brutalized by tradition, a people caught in the upheavals of a nation struggling through the 20th century.

[He] was often called the Egyptian Balzac for his vivid frescoes of Cairenes and their social, political and religious dilemmas. Critics compared his richly detailed Cairo with the London of Charles Dickens, the Paris of Émile Zola and the St. Petersburg of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Peter Theroux, the American translator of several major Arab novelists, wrote about completing a new version of “Children of the Alley” in 1996: “Readers of Mahfouz in any language are in thrall to his magic. The warmth of Mahfouz’s characters, the velocity of his storytelling, his gift for fluent dialogue and telling details are unique in modern Arabic literature.”

update: Here is the LA Times' obit. It's very prettily written.