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Rants, Rates, Slags, Slates. Manic-depressive posts from Red Wright-Hand. Because there are thousands of worthless blogs out there and who am I not to add to their number?
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Sunday, April 11, 2004
LONG TRILOGY, LONG POST: I finished Sugar Street, the last volume of Naguib Mahfouz’ Cairo Trilogy, yesterday morning, and I suppose my opinion of the complete work remains essentially the same as expressed here on April 1st. To get the most negative statement out of the way: if this trilogy had been written exactly the same way about an American family in a large American city, I doubt very much that I would have read it through to the end. The effect is as of staring through the various windows (front, back and bedroom) of a representative Cairo family from 1917 through 1944 (approx. from the end of one World War to another) with all the fun and boredom that entails. No denying that, due to its sheer length, the trilogy conveys a sense of the grinding passage of time over decades, the wreckage it makes of bodies and hopes. But, as stated before, Mahfouz is not much of a tale-teller, preferring instead to marinate us in the often very slow simmer of daily events and thoughts as they occur in the lives of his characters, many of whom lose their charm (so far as I'm concerned) over the three novels. Take Yasin, the oldest of the five al-Jawad children: the comic aspects of his non-stop philandering and lying really start to curdle after a while, until he’s seen as just a fat lazy selfish predictable slob…and then we just keep on seeing him and seeing him. Likewise Kamal, the youngest son and impotent intellectual: if the author intended to portray the boring sterility of a neurotic life given over entirely to intellectual pursuits, well, dear reader, he succeeds to a big fat fault. I was thoroughly sick of Kamal and his insanely self-involved brooding (especially on the subject of love), of which the less said the better. There’s a statement Mahfouz never heard of...: he does everything to a fault, doesn’t know how to make a point succinctly, doesn’t when to move on artistically. Of course, people don’t change, of course people settle into patterns of self-defeating behavior, but that’s no reason to bury the reader under the sands of this observation in chapter after redundant chapter. And would it kill us to have a little more drama? (I know, I know, I'm a hopeless Westerner.) Even the outbreak of WW2, significant parts of which were fought in Egypt, seems to become just one more thing for the characters to talk about endlessly…okay, there’s that one dramatic air-raid scene leading to the death of a major character, but…that wasn’t enough. I don’t need Gen. Rommel to personally drive a tank onto the scene, but I couldn’t help remembering War and Peace, which as I recall managed to present a truly huge cast of interestingly vivid characters over its epic length, and managed to blend the historic and personal aspects of early 19th-century Russian society. I couldn’t help remembering Sentimental Education, Flaubert’s unsurpassed novel of French generational history, whose young hero, passing into middle age, experiences romantic anguish, gradual disenchantment with life, and extinction of boyish ideals, all conveyed in meticulous language in just slightly over (can it be?) 400 pages. Oh yeah, the sexism thing too, and wondering how much of it is Mahfouz’s observation of Arabic life and how much of it is simply his own: the short shrift given to female characters, though they’re seen to grow more independent as time moves on. Touches I did like very much: Mutawalli al-Samad, the ancient street-sheikh, not remembering who the deceased elder al-Jawad was as the funeral procession passes by; it's a great and truly sad depiction of how everyone passes out of mind eventually…the “future in abeyance” tableau of Sugar Street's conclusion, as two opposed brothers of the youngest generation, a Communist and an Islamic fundamentalist, are detained in prison, while their uncles (Yasin and Kamal) shop for characteristic clothing: baby clothes for Yasin’s impending grandchild, a new black tie for Kamal to wear for the impending funeral of his and Yasin’s dying mother. And, of course, learning the adjective Cairene. So, in the end: three novels (or one really huge one) affording more pleasure for having been read than they did while actually being read. I hear good things about Tayeb Salih.... Here’s a link to some good introductory material on Mahfouz. |
