Cairo walks

J.M. Coetzee says that with these stories 8212; set in 8220;medieval Cairo, an area of about one square kilometre8221; 8212; it was Mahfouz8217;s 8220;example above all that spurred the advance of the novel in Arabic, from Morocco to Bahrain8221;. The tribute rings loud once again, as Egypt8217;s latest literary star, Alaa Al Aswany, gathers accolades for his new novel, The Yacoubian Building. The project of mapping Cairo, and thereby the Egyptian mind, continues.

But how imperceptibly that world came to the reader in the Cairo trilogy Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street, in which two generations of a family open to modernity and its challenges, between the two World Wars. Amina, the patriarch8217;s wife, wakes up at midnight. 8220;She always woke up then without having to rely on an alarm clock 8230; there was no clue by which to judge the time. The street noise outside her room would continue until dawn. She could hear the babble of voices from the coffeehouses and bars, whether it was early evening, midnight, or just before daybreak.8221;

Mahfouz himself was born in medieval Cairo in 1911, and he made it his life8217;s accomplishment to find coherence and drama in those voices. It often enraged fundamentalists. And in October 1994, on his way to his favourite coffeehouse, one of them stabbed him in the neck. He became partially deaf but he refused to abandon the Cairo street. Or the coffeehouse.