Sugar Street

It is the end of an era in the history of the al-Sayyid Ahmad family. The younger generation is taking over as Hitler comes into power raising the question of whether or not life would be better under German rule than it had been under 50+ years of British occupation. The Cairo trilogy focuses on the changes that took place in the years after WWI leading into a more modern era. These changes occurred slowly which Mahfouz mirrors with his slow methodical style of writing.

I thought this book was a strong ending to an excellent trilogy. I gained a better sense of the social, religious, and political ramifications in this part of the Muslim world. "The teachings and precepts of Islam provide a comprehensive answer to the problems people confront in reference to this world and the next. Those who assume that its doctrines apply only to the spiritual and devotional aspects of life are mistaken. Islam is a creed, a way of worship, a nation and a nationality, a religion, a state, a form of spirituality, a Holy Book, and a sword." (275)

It is good to know that human nature is much the same no matter what country one lives in. Parents care about their children and wish the best for them, love and marriage is challenging, people get old and die, but life goes on. Mahfouz pulls off an almost-perfect ending which isn't an easy feat after 1,000 pages and three decades of the inner workings of one extended family experiencing problems and changes in their personal lives and political and societal changes in their country. ( )

The final book in The Cairo Trilogy begins about eight years after the close of the previous volume and provides, somewhat, an end to the story begun many pages ago in Palace Walk. My initial enthusiasm for the trilogy has been somewhat dimmed as the author tried espousing the opposing political views at that time, which did not provide for a driving narrative. The tyrannical patriarch of the first volume, al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, is now an old man, sick and confined to his bed for the most part, his lively band of friends, either dead or soon to be. As vile a character as he initially was, he’s now a shell of his former self and I actually missed the stories of his antics that had provided so much of the interest of the previous books.

His son Kamal is no live wire either. Although it has been years since the love of his life (who never returned his affection) has been married and living in Europe, he still dwells on thoughts of her and ends up actually stalking her younger sister, unable to actually make an advance to her that might result in an actual relationship. She eventually gives up on him and marries another. And Amina, the humble, untiring wife of Ahmad, who wanted only to be able to visit the shrine and pray has also changed:

”Visits to the al-Husayn and to the other saints and their shrines were the only relief she found. Thanks to al-Sayid Ahmad, who no longer restricted her movements, she was allowed to hurry off to God’s sanctuaries whenever she felt the need. Amina herself was no longer the same woman she has once been. Grief and ill-health had changed her considerably. With the passing years she had lost her amazing diligence and her extraordinary capacity for tidying up, cleaning and running her home.” (Page 6)

Most of the narrative focuses on Kamal’s sister Khadija’s sons, their generation and the political upheaval occurring in Egypt in the waning years of WWII. Abd al-Muni'm and Ahmad choose entirely different paths in life, Ahmad becoming a journalist with Marxist ties and, much to his mother’s chagrin, he chooses to marry a working woman who holds the same views. Abd al-Munim, on the other hand, is a fundamentalist Muslim who joins the Muslim Brethren and marries a very traditional choice---his Uncle Yasin’s daughter. Yasin’s son, Ridwan, rises quickly in the ranks of the bureaucracy, quickly surpassing his father and Uncle Kamal, not because of his skills but, rather, because of his inclusion in a homosexual faction that he happily becomes a part of.

With the emphasis on this new generation, which we learn about very quickly over a couple hundred pages, and the demise of the old generation, which dominated the narrative in the first two books, I found it difficult to embrace characters that hadn’t already been firmly in place in my subconscious. That brings up another important point: the speed with which the narrative flows in this volume compared to the slow unwinding of the story in the first two volumes. I’m sure Mahfouz meant this to be a reflection of the changes Egypt was also undergoing, but the sacrifice was a brief introduction to characters you don’t really get to know very well. Kamal seems to be a part of an older generation and his plodding ways, in both romance and his journal articles, separate him completely from the precocious, lively child we were introduced to in Palace Walk.

Taken as a whole, the trilogy provided an appealing look at Egyptian family life, surrounded by the political atmosphere in Egypt during the early to mid-twentieth century but it seems that the story told, really wasn’t complete and probably could have used a longer narrative to address the imprisonment of Ahmad and his brother Abd al-Munim, as well as the ongoing hostilities occurring in Egypt in the late 1940s. Still, an amazing accomplishment and highly recommended. ( )

After having explored the angst of patriarchy and that of unrequited love, Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, in its third volume Sugar Street, moves on to the angst of the existential. No one is happy and no one is wise in the al Jawad and Shawkat families as the economic depression of the late 1930s leads into the Second World War; Egypt has modernized, yet in many ways the revolution has stalled. The characters may no longer be under the strict tyrannical thumb of the family patriarch or the British colonizer, but neither do they have a clear sense of direction themselves. Their lives trickle away as their former oppressors linger on, becoming ever more decrepit and obsolete.

Unfortunately, no matter what kind of angst Mahfouz grants to the al Jawad family, I remain less than enthralled. The angst of patriarchy, explored in Palace Walk, was the most engaging for me personally (possibly because the most foreign to my own experience, possibly because most vividly evoked), but with the focus on Kamal's lovesickness in Palace of Desire and his endless existential indecisiveness in Sugar Street, I couldn't help losing patience. Where, in the Cairo Trilogy, is the insight and depth one would expect of a 1000+ page work? Where is the stylistic accomplishment? I just don't see it.

Which is unfortunate, because there is so much here that holds the potential for a great read: the modernization of a country over time; the interplay of the political and the personal in a time of revolution; the changing gender dynamics of twentieth-century Egypt; the politicization/radicalization of Islam in the 1930s and 40s. And indeed we do glimpse all these themes throughout Mahfouz's trilogy, but in a way that never ceases to seem, in my mind, somehow introductory or superficial. Mahfouz's love of introductions can't be denied: in Palace Walk, the first 200 pages consist almost entirely of character introductions, in which the author tells us all about the players' various physical and moral characteristics rather than demonstrating them through action. Even when action finally arrives, it is sufficiently episodic (especially in the later books) that one feels one is essentially being presented with a sketch of a potential narrative, rather than ever feeling what said action might be like in the moment. It's almost as if someone is telling you about a novel, rather than reading the actual novel itself. Mahfouz re-introduces all the characters at the beginning of the two subsequent books, and by the time he reaches Sugar Street the action is SO episodic that months and even years may pass between chapters, necessitating the repetition of all those physical and emotional descriptions all over again at frequent intervals throughout the novel.

On the other hand, the few times I truly felt immersed in a character's mental or emotional landscape, I perversely wished myself away again. Kamal's endless indecision about whether or not to get married, for example—I'm sure that Mahfouz is attempting to make some kind of Henry James-style statement about how Kamal's preoccupation with philosophy and his overly analytical nature are trapping him into a life of non-action, but Sugar Street is no Beast in the Jungle1: rather than plumbing the depths of Kamal's psyche or confronting the reader with the ruins of his wasted life, Kamal's sections here resemble more the experience of hanging out repeatedly with an extremely whiny friend who delivers the same self-pitying diatribe every time one takes him out for a beer. Not only that, but Mahfouz's style (or the style of William Maynard Hutchins's translation) fails to add much humor or aesthetic pleasure to the characters' neuroses:


Kamal went around in circles while the whole world advanced. He kept asking himself, "Are you going to get married or not?" Life seemed to offer nothing but gloomy confusion. His opportunity was neither ideal nor worthless. Love was difficult. It was characterized by controversy and suffering. If only she would marry someone else so he could free himself from this confusion and torment.

I mean, I can understand struggling with angst because one's father is a near-schizophrenic tyrant who never stops yelling at one, but come on: "Love was difficult"? Who ever said that it wouldn't be? What a stellar reason for life-long paralysis.

All this venting aside, there were a few interesting aspects to Sugar Street. I appreciated that Yasin, late in life, grew a sense of humor and became prone to saying things like "We're a religious family. Yes, we're dissolute inebriates, but we all plan to repent eventually." I found the storyline concerning al-Jawad grandson Ridwan interesting to the point where I wished he would be given his own novel, full of ambitious young gay Egyptian politicos doing their sexy turncoat thing. Ahmad and Sawsan and their naive yet refreshingly active and companionable life as Communist activists were also intriguing. And I was interested in the tendency, as Egyptian society becomes marginally less oppressive, for nearly all the characters to wax nostalgic about how far things have declined from its former glories: even Amina takes time to reminisce about the good old times when she was confined to the house on pain of eviction. Those were the days! Simultaneously, both Kamal and Yasin chastise themselves for their failure to measure up to their father, who, they imagine, was drinking and whoring from his heart, whereas they're just doing it to kill time:


Jalila's lover had been a passionate and impetuous man with a heart untroubled by qualms. What was Kamal compared to that man? Even when he visited the brothel each Thursday, only alcohol could release him from his worries long enough for him to enjoy "love" here.

So there you go, mums and dads: be sure to engage in your brothel-patronage with both buttocks, as Montaigne would say, if you want to win the respect of your offspring. In all seriousness, given that the al-Jawad père we saw as readers hardly possessed the "heart untroubled by qualms" imagined by his son, this passage does comment interestingly on how the compulsive dishonesty of the al-Jawad family leads to false impressions that haunt its members for the rest of their lives. Not interestingly enough, though, for me to mourn the end of Sugar Street and the Cairo Trilogy as a whole.

*******

1That's right, I'm comparing a book to a Henry James novella, and the James is winning out. Those who know my feelings on Henry James will appreciate how uncomplimentary this is. Although the thing is: I can appreciate that James is an accomplished artist, albeit one whose work I don't enjoy. Whereas I honestly don't understand the source of the Nobel Prize Committee's admiration for Mahfouz's art.