It is the story of an Egyptian family, set in Cairo during the years 1917 – 1919, the time of the First Egyptian Revolution – and its signal achievement, in my opinion, is how it infuses into a simple narrative, different layers and levels of meaning, complex but never abstruse, intertwined but never dense.
In Sugar Street, the final novel of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, change and tragedy continue for both the al-Jawad family and for Egypt as the height of the Great Depression gives way to a new European war and the terror of new weapons while independence for Egypt remains elusive.I suppose it is impossible to pick up a Mahfouz book without unrealistically high expectations: he won the Nobel Prize (and gave this beautiful acceptance speech), is commonly regarded as the creator and foremost practitioner of the contemporary Arab novel form, and to top it all, my translation’s blurb compares him to Flaubert, Balzac and Proust. In it we follow 17-year-old Kamal as he deals with crises of faith and unrequited love in 1920’s Egypt. Palace of Desire is the second novel of Nobel Prize Winner Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. As Egypt struggles towards independence, so to do the younger members of the al-Jawad family struggle for greater personal freedom against oppression from tradition and religion. Considered to be his masterpiece, the trilogy follows the lives of members of the conservative al-Jawad family from the First World War to the Second. Palace Walk is the first novel of Nobel Prize Winner Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. To see my reviews for each of these novels, see the links below: The Cairo Trilogy – Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street – is the masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz the only person to have won the Prize for literature for work primarily in Arabic.
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