Naguib Mahfouz, RIP
I found myself saddened when Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd Al-Jawad passed from the scene of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. He was not at all a likable man, ruling as a grim and humorless patriarch in his home even as he led the secret nocturnal life of a sybarite -- a life he did his utmost to deny to members of his own family, even as his sons came to emulate him without knowing it at first. But the reader got to know him well, for he is arguably Mahfouz's single greatest creation as a character.
He dominated a series of novels that was cramped -- almost claustrophobic -- in its spacial setting, really only a few city blocks in old Cairo, and almost always in family quarters or a few pleasure bars even then. Yet this was a family drama of the interwar years that was so bound up with Egypt's national destiny that, taken as a whole, the Cairo Trilogy is almost as sweeping and at least as great as War and Peace.
I do not read Arabic, and I am told that most of Mahfouz's other work (with the exception of Midaq Alley) has been published in inadequate English translations that do not capture the power of his original Arabic prose. We can only hope that this will change, even though it will have to come in the wake of Mahfouz's death yesterday at the age of 94.