Red Right Blog |
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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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Arts & Letters Daily
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Sunday, May 23, 2004
"No one, not Pushkin, not Mahfouz, can describe what happened to us." -- a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison in the reign of Saddam Hussein, as quoted in a 1993 Human Rights Watch report (courtesy The New Yorker, May 17, 2004). Which leads me to some follow-up comments upon Mahfouz's work. No doubt that my Western tastes kept me from reading his Cairo Trilogy with great enthusiasm, no doubt that I simply don't get the rhythms of Arabic literature, at least not yet. But obviously Arabic readers get Mahfouz, as witness the quote above. Clearly the man matters. And as weeks have passed since I finished the Trilogy, the portions of it which seemed to me redundant and gaseous and overdrawn have filtered out of mind, till what remains, successfully, is its emotional core, the living depiction of a troubled Egyptian family and nation. (Something like when I read Dreiser's Sister Carrie, rolling my eyes at the laborious prose, but finally absorbed by the author's powers of social observation.) Another underlying theme that remains from Mahfouz' novels: humiliation. The rage at being pushed around by Western forces (British in early-20th.-c. Cairo, but oh how times change). The inferiority complex, the self-loathing, the rage, the rage. I admit it: my initial reading of Mahfouz will have to be revised. |
