![]() ![]() ![]() Mahfouz's characters blaze with intensity, his Egypt pulsates with unresolved tensions. Tragedy, in this busy family drama, can mean anything from marrying below one's station to a massacre of protesters by English constables and Egyptian soldiers. The inadvertent cause of their undoing may be another scion of the patriarch, young Ridwan, a closet homosexual whose liaison with a prominent politician apparently backfires. These two diametrically opposed brothers will share the same fate-a jail cell. ![]() Those include his Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street. One of his nephews, Abd Al-Muni'm, becomes a Muslim fundamentalist another nephew, Ahmad, takes Marx as his prophet. Diwan began by publishing 12 Mahfouz books at once. Kamal, son of the gaunt, wasted patriarch, is a grade-school teacher and philosopher who veers between lusty debauches and reading Spinoza. The third volume of his Cairo Trilogy, the novel opens in 1935 as Egypt smolders under British occupation, and it extends through the war. Nobel Prize winner Mahfouz's stunning portrait of a family in dissolution (first published in 1957) mirrors an Egypt trying to plunge into the modern world but beset by colonialism, a rigid class system and political oppression. ![]()
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