The religion of Cairo is yet another theme of 'Palace of Desire' - specifically, the popular, heavily Sufi lslam with its talismans, spells and saints that's so much a part of the Abd al-Jawad family. All the magic, mystery and suffering of Egypt in the 1920's are conveyed on a human scale: the career of the Egyptian nationalist hero Sa'd Zaghlul is reported here in the arguments of his high-school-age admirers and detractors the British presence is felt through the acts - seductive, cruel or charitable - of individual English soldiers, or through the memories of them and the themes of love and infidelity bring out the playwright in the novelist. His towering strength as a writer is his luminous specificity. Mahfouz became the first Arab writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The political upheavals Egypt experiences in its transition from British colony to independent monarchy and the psychological damage wrought by a series of almost compulsive extramarital affairs among the characters in the novel - the dual themes of the book, illustrating Cairo's public and private life - are depicted through Kamal's teen-age watchfulness and through his adolescent embarrassment about his big head and big nose (which makes him dread his teaching career). It tells of the ups and downs of an Egyptian family of almost Tolstoyan proportions, through the dominating sensibility of Kamal, the youngest of the Abd al-Jawad children - an undoubted portrait of the artist.

'Palace of Desire' opens just a few years later, in the early 1920's. Mahfouz's novel 'Palace of Desire' takes after the eponymous street, not only in its sinuous turns but as desire, in various guises - romance, patriotism, infatuation and adultery - shapes its wonderfully interlocking plots and echoes through the book.Īs the second novel in his celebrated 'Cairo Trilogy,' 'Palace of Desire' resumes the saga of the Abd al-Jawad family begun in 'Palace Walk.' That first volume was dominated by the stern but philandering patriarch, al-Sayyid Ahmad, and his oldest son, Fahmy, and concluded with Fahmy's violent death in a demonstration against the British occupation of Egypt. A man sitting in a shop on the right could reach over and shake hands with his neighbor on the other side.' Mr. 'Narrowness gave the road an unassuming, familiar character, like that of a pet animal.

No matter where a person stood, he was always confronted by a curve, behind which an unknown world lay concealed,' Naguib Mahfouz writes. Palace of Desire is a bow-shaped street in one of Cairo's oldest districts: 'Every few meters it turned. PALACE OF DESIREThe Cairo Trilogy II.By Naguib Mahfouz.Translated by William Maynard Hutchins,Lorne M.

Cairo trilogy