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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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Thursday, April 01, 2004
On a tenuously related note: since February I've been slowly reading through The Cairo Trilogy, a vast, sprawling, rambling and at times frustratingly-pokey family epic by Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. The trilogy is comprised of the novels Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street (all named after actual Cairo throughfares) and since I expect to finish Palace of Desire tonight, I will here officially proclaim myself 2/3s of the way through the whole work. For a long time I'd heard this trilogy described as one of the premier examples of Arabic literature, so I've been reading it carefully, and right now I'm giving it a grade of B. There isn't a single character or event that rings false, and quite a lot about daily life (c. early-20th century) and even more about nightlife in a crowded Arabic city is revealed to a benighted Westerner such as myself, in particular the interpenetration of Qu'ranic scripture in everyday thought and speech. On the other hand, Mahfouz is not much of a storyteller, with events simply unfolding without any grand narrative structure (is this the essence of Middle Eastern art? Is this the point?), and, worse, he is often gaseous in the extreme: a young man's interminable monologues about unrequited love take up much of Palace of Desire, and brother, was I happy when he finally decided to get drunk and visit a hooker instead (on p. 348, if you're interested). And the English translation...hoo boy! This book has GOT to sound better in Arabic than it does thanks to William Hutchins and Lorne & Olive Kenny: "The closest he could come to identifying his beloved was through attribution to it of some divine names, like truth, the joy of life, and the light of knowledge. It seemed his journey would be long. His lover appeared to have boarded the train of Auguste Comte and passed by the station of theology, where the password was 'Yes, Mother.'" And this is after he's been laid... HOWEVER: The same character (in the same chapter!) gets off one of the best observations in the entire Trilogy (so far) and here it is: "Be careful not to mock youthful dreams, for that's a symptom of senility. People affected by this disease term their sarcasm 'wisdom.'" Yes! It's true! And so I look forward to seeing the Trilogy to its end. |
