Year of the Reading 6: "The Palace of Desire"

I started reading The Cairo Trilogy years ago, but never made it past the first novel. Now I have finally finished the second. Naguib Mahfouz was the only Arabic novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. You can understand why as you are reading his novels.

"The Palace of Desire" picks up where the first one left off, with the death of one of the sons. Then we follow the other two boys on various adventures. Kamal, the youngest, has fallen in love with the rather worldly girl, Aida. Does he end up with her? What do you think? I don't want to spoil the ending, in case one of my dear readers (is there more than one?) wants to go down to the local shop and pick this one up. The other son, Yasin, has developed quite a passion of rather large women, and the novelist is quite interested in describing all of their "folds."

The other characters of the family are there as well. The father no longer terrorizes the family like in the first novel. The death of his other son has sapped some of this energy. The mother is still there, but more in the background this time, since the daughters have gone off and gotten married. The daughters, when they appear, haven't changed that much. Aisha is still thin and nice. Khadija is still mean and even fatter. One of the great moments in the book comes when Khadija reveals that Yasin made a pass at her in public, before he recognized who she was.

The three novels are quite modern in their scope. I was amazed at how many misadventures Mahfouz puts his characters into, particularly since this takes place in the Islamic country of Egypt. As you read, he takes you into the most unseemly bars and bordellos that Cairo has to offer. I was particularly shocked when Aida offered some ham to her young suitor, Kamal. It kind of makes me wonder what my students are up to in Kuwait!

Mahfouz was stabbed by a man a few years before his death last year. The man claimed he was attacking him because of how he had slandered Islam. These weren't the books that set him off, but after reading them I can see why a conservative would be shocked. I don't know if I have really learned that much about the Islamic world while reading them, but I have entered a world I never thought I would experience: inside an Islamic home.

So pick up a copy of the whole trilogy when you can. At only 1313 pages you can spend months, if not years, in faraway Cairo.