Immediate charm of place and beautifully sketched characters. It's easy to get engrossed in this world. It was sometimes hard to read the women, like in any older book, but overall I loved his discerning eye cast on this little slice of a city. ( )

The more I read of Mahfouz, the more confused I grow. I have read excellent works and I have read works that I considered a waste of time. I chose this work specifically as one I had somehow overlooked and which has a very good reputation. The plot revolves around a large cast of individuals who live or work in this tiny alley in Cairo during World War II. The book is no more or less than the story of these and a number of other lives. Mahfouz’s themes are numerous: religion, marriage, gender roles, and even Egyptian nationalism. But overriding them all, perhaps is the economics of wealth and poverty. Indeed, Mahfouz is said to have acknowledged that Hamida, whose desperation to leave the alley ends in tragedy, is a metaphor for Egypt itself. The characters are very well-drawn and complex but I found not one of them particularly sympathetic. Sadly, they often seemed more pitiful than unfortunate. Mahfouz doesn’t judge—a strength of his writing and his depictions—but ultimately I found this more depressing and disappointing than anything else. [Trivia: this was made into a Mexican film, El Callejón de los Milagros, starring Salma Hayek. It won a substantial number of awards in many Spanish-speaking countries.] ( )

I've not read any fiction from Egypt in quite some time so was excited to find this book and read about the culture of poverty as it exists in an alley. I had to keep reminding myself that the time for this novel was during and at the end of World War 2 because the characterization seemed timeless. ( )

1.1

Published in 1947, and set in Cairo in the 1940s, this is the story of a small community of neighbors. We are introduced to the residents of Midaq Alley and find out about their ways of life. We meet the barber, café owner, a baker and his wife, a “doctor,” a “dentist,” the landlady, a matchmaker, and a several others. These characters move in and out of the narrative. The neighborhood gossips are active so not much goes on without the entire alley finding out about it.

The closest we get to a protagonist is Hamida, a young woman living with her foster mother, and her three suitors. We hear about her desire to escape a life of poverty, but one has to question her ultimate choice. The people in the book are rather unpleasant. There is no overall storyline. It is a book for those who enjoy character studies with a flurry of action toward the end. I liked it enough to read another book by this author.
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