Palace Walk. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 19, 1990 by Jake Morrissey

Palace Walk, by Naguib Mahfouz (Doubleday, 498 pp., $22.95)

WHEN THE EGYPTIAN writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988--the first Arab writer to be so honored--it wasn't owing to his world-wide reputation. In fact, in the United States, Mahfouz had virtually no reputation at all; few critics and fewer readers had ever heard of him. The New York Times reported that when the Swedish Academy of Letters disclosed that Mahfouz had been given the Nobel, those who had gathered in Stockholm for the announcement "dispersed quietly and quickly. One said later that she and others had immediately gone searching for copies of Mr. Mahfouz's writings in local bookstores. They eventually found a copy of work first published in 1957 that was on a sale rack in a store that specialized in used books."

U.S. publishers of the 78-year-old writer's works no doubt hope that situation will change. At least three of Mahfouz's books recently have been published in new editions, and William M. Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny's smooth translation of Palace Walk, the first volume of the Cairo Trilogy, his masterwork, was published here last month. Soon American readers will be able to experience what the Swedich Academy called "works rich in nuance--now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous."

Whether Mahfouz's books measure up to such praise is open to question, however. He has been called "the Dickens of the Cairo cafes." Sadly, Palace Walk lacks the verve and structure that made Dickens so readable.

Palace Walk takes place in Cairo during and just after World War I. Unlike Dickens, who relished weaving disparate threads of the London soucial fabric into a coherent whole--as he did in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend--Mahfouz is content to focus on one family. Dickens's mastery of the dynamics of plot and motivation braid a richly hued carpet, full of deep color and captivating intracacy. Mahfouz satisfies himself with the literary equivalent of a rather bland needlepoint seat cover.

Admirers of Palace Walk no doubt will argue that Mahfouz is not really interested in telling a good yarn; he's writing about Egypt, and his characters are metaphors for parts of the Egyptian psyche. The argument is valid, but is begs the question: Without a framework that would compel the reader through the novel, Palace Walk in more like a well-written forced march than a pleasure trip.

Mahfouz seems fascinated by the details of his characters' lives, at the expense of all else. In this nearly five-hundred-page novel, dialogue is secondary to minutiae about the family's intellectual, moral, and spiritual lives. Mahfouz adheres to the diamond-cutting school of writing: he cuts and polishes his themes into facets that refract and illuminate. His vision is clear, his characters fully realized, his images lingering. What's lacking is a solid plot, the perfect setting to complement the stone he's cut. It's simply not there.

Perhaps the deliberate pace of Palace Walk reflects the period in which it is set: After all, in Cairo at the turn of the century, traditions were intractable, social reforms unheard of, male dominance unquestioned. Many women, for example, weren't allowed to be seen in public. (At one point in Palace Walk, when a young police officer who has seen one of the daughters at a window proposes marriage, her father, ignorant of what has happened, is thunderstruck. "How can this officer ask for the hand of Aisha despite the fact that no one has seen her?" he shouts. "No daughter of mine will marry a man until I am satisfied that his primary motive for marrying her is a sincere desire to be related to me . . . me . . . me . . . me.")

Mahfouz apparently isn't bothered by his inconsistent plotting. When a translator expressed concern over some repetition in one of Mahfouz's novels, Mahfouz is said to have laughed, pointed to the Nile and replied: "You see that great river. It rolls on and on. This is our culture. We love variations on a theme!"

The British writer John Fowles has written that Mahfouz gives readers "the rare privilege of experiencing a national psychology in a way that thousands of journalistic articles or television documentaries could not achieve." Perhaps that is true. But for readers who are as interested in watching the evolution of a story as the evolution of a culture, they should pick up a Dickens, not a Mahfouz.

Mr. Morrissey, a former editor, is a freelance writer in New York.