Palace Walk

I read Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz after reading Steve Pick’s review of the book. Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in literature, which, second only to Steve’s endorsement, was a good reason to pick up the book.

The story is of a family in Cairo right at the end of World War I. The family patriarch is a rigid, dogmatic man who rules his home with an iron fist but leads a separate life of drunkenness and lechery that he pursues out of view of family and friends. His sons and daughters fear, and yet strangely admire, their father. We come to know all the family as flawed human beings who are nevertheless bound together by family loyalty. Their Muslim faith helps provide a sort of cohesion to their fractious relationships.

In the second half of the book, the setting in post-war Cairo injects an external political dimension to a story dominated by domestic tension. How the various family members respond to a world that their father has tried to isolate them from drives the narrative arc of the rest of the novel.

I have to admit that I nearly gave up reading this book. The first half has the pacing of an afternoon TV soap opera. In fact, most of the book consists of interior narrative. The emotions and thoughts of each of the characters are lavishly explored, often separating consecutive statements of dialog by a page or more of explication. That, and I found the invocations of “God,” “the Lord” and Koran quotes on nearly every page distracting. But I stuck with it, and by the halfway point, action replaced stasis and the story became much more engaging.

As with many other novels I’ve read, I acknowledge that if there’s an ur-narrative in which the characters are meant to be reifications of ideas and their actions metaphors for the clash of those ideas, that part escaped me. I’ve spent too much of my adult life reading and writing science, I guess.

Palace Walk is the first book of The Cairo Trilogy. At some point, I may read the remaining two novels in the trilogy. For now, I let this experience settle. Maybe I’ll read some more reviews to open my eyes to the intended messages.