The Cairo Trilogy

The Cairo Trilogy
by Naghib Mahfouz
read: circa 1997
Guardian 1000 Novels

I remember that towards the end of my junior year of high school, we got our summer reading assignments. Senior year was world literature.  We had a couple mandatory books and then could choose two books by any author on a list of about 25.  The problem was that I'd only heard of one or two of them!  But armed with some pluck, I did a moderate amount of research (this was pre-Wikipedia and I might have had to use actual books), learning a few facts about the writing of each author, his nation of origin, and a couple of his best-known works.  I think I even typed up my research for the rest of the class.  Man, was I ever cool in high school.  I ultimately decided that Egyptian novelist Naghib Mahfouz, the man who put the Arabic novel on the map, was the most obscure and pretentious name on the list, so I grabbed the first two volumes in the Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk and Palace of Desire.

Supposedly after writing The Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz decided he had done all he could with the realistic novel genre and moved on to other novel styles.  I don't know if that's true or if Mahfouz's self-assessment is accurate, but these are great books and I enjoyed them.  I was a typical high school nerd who thought too much and was too much of a wuss to ask any ladies out, so I really identified with the overly-introspective, too-analytical Kamal, who I thought of as a kindred spirit across the barriers of time, oceans, language, and reality.