Cairo Modern, by Naguib Mahfouz

I tend to have somewhat mixed feelings about Mahfouz novels - I like some, others, I don't really connect to. This one fell rather more into the latter camp. I read it pretty quickly, and even enjoyed it in some sense, but it just didn't seem like that great a book. Actually, what was kind of fascinating about it to me was that it read like a fairly typical nineteenth century French naturalist novel that got plopped into a different historical time and place. To be clear, I am not complaining that it seemed like an alien form imposed onto a resistant context, but rather that I'm just not that into nineteenth century naturalism.  Though I am somewhat intrigued by the idea that something about the political context of Egypt in the 1930s seems to call for that literary genre, and curious about the reception of these books in Egypt.

Like other books of Mahfouz's, this one can be somewhat unclear at times if you're not familiar with that political context, but it actually demands less of the reader than his other works. The basic issues are pretty clear, even if you don't know the intricacies of the background (perhaps the book would be more rewarding if you did). The novel starts off tracking a group of friends, but after 40 pages, it abandons all but one of them, focusing instead on his poverty and the marriage of convenience he enters into to escape it. The psychological profile will be familiar to anyone who's read Mahfouz's books; a bitter young man who just can't get ahead, who is cruel and heartless but also somewhat pitiful in his angsty immaturity. His female counterpart is by far the more interesting character, but unfortunately, we don't spend nearly as much time in her head. There is a subtlety to the portrayal of the characters that is easy to miss among the broad brushstrokes that detail their actions and inner states - while it seems somewhat crude when you're first reading it, it gains in retrospect, as you realize that a lot of the scenes were more carefully drawn than they first appeared.

Overall, it's a decent book, but not the place to start with Mahfouz.

The Thief and the Dogs, by Naguib Mahfouz

I wasn't that taken with Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days, though it's quite likely that it was my fault, and not the book's, but in any case, I was quite impressed by The Thief and the Dogs. In a strange sort of way, it actually reminds me a lot of The Informer and Miałem Tylko Jedno Życie - hopefully something I can think about more when I finish my PhD... In any case, what's curious about it is that it's a revenge story, but one where everything goes wrong. I don't want to give away too much, so I guess I'll stick with saying that things don't work out the way they should (in a standard revenge plot), and in the process, the whole premise of revenge is questioned. It's really kind of fascinating. At the same time, there's this kind of subtle reflection on ideals and beliefs, a quiet juxtaposition of religion and politics, and the kinds of truths they offer, that was really interesting. And then there's the socio-political element, a look at life in Egypt - something that I know nothing about, really.

The prose is marvelously evocative for such a sparse work. I tore through the novel in fits and starts during the day today* - I had a hard time putting it down. Maybe it's because I knew a little better what to expect, but I really appreciated the mildly opaque quality of Mahfouz's storytelling. Especially intriguing is the way he plays with the reliability of the narrator - the text is so close to first person that some people describe it as stream of consciousness, but in actuality, as the novel progresses you move further and further from him, and you become more aware of how his mind works, wondering, for instance, if he isn't deluding himself when he thinks he's in love, and beginning to question whether the justice he seeks is actually so virtuous. Really, quite a remarkable book.

*Ah, the pleasures of immersing yourself in a good book while traveling (I'm currently on vacation in Florida with my parents. Florida is neato! Crocodiles! Dolphins! Manatees! Sharks! Blue herons! Bald Eagles! Great food! Palm trees! What fun!). I mentioned this in my review of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Really, there's something so wonderful and decadent about it. While you end up missing out on a lot of things you ought to be looking at during your travels, that book ends up being far more firmly enshrined in your memory than the ones you read at home. It's so glorious.

Morning and Evening Talk, Naguib Mahfouz

I'm going to Cairo for a week in May, so in preparation, I picked up the Lonely Planet guide (only much later did I notice that it's from 2008...) and this novel (dorky, I know. Even dorkier, I actually got another Mahfouz book as well, and I already had Andre Aciman's memoir, Out of Egypt, waiting on my shelf. Immersion!). I'd read Mahfouz before (and liked some of his books more than I liked others - though my first encounter with him was more than 5 years ago, maybe I'd feel differently now), and this novel, a later work of his, looked intriguing. It's a kind of biographical dictionary, alphabetically organized, with short accounts of the person's life. The people described come from three interconnected families, and the book spans from Napoleonic times to the 1980s. I thought to myself that it would either be amazing or annoyingly contrived, and it turns out to be decidedly more of the former. It's incredible how absorbing a 1-2 page dictionary entry on a person can be! And how wonderfully the pieces begin to form a whole, an world of interrelated characters as dense as any realist novel. I definitely do not know enough about Egyptian history (early on in my reading of the book I did some quick research, ie, read the wiki entry and the Lonely Planet rundown) to fully appreciate what the novel was doing - and unlike many realist novels, this book won't really teach you the history its set in. On the other hand, its like 120 pages, instead of the 350-500 of most realist classics. But you are clearly aware that your ignorance is depriving you of a proper appreciation of this book - its like listening to music on your iPod with only one earphone in. Still, I definitely recommend it - even if you're not getting the full richness, it's still a pretty wonderful book.

Autumn Quail, by Naguib Mahfouz

 I picked this one up at Cherry Valley Bookstore, a cool little shop with a really excellent selection of high quality used books. Mahfouz is one of the authors in my personal pantheon, that is, one of the authors whose works I am trying to read all of. He's an especially fascinating one, because there are observable changes in his style over the long arc of his career, from more typical realist-style fare (though with a goodly dose of symbolism) to more formally experimental (which I prefer, I think). He writes a lot of bitter, angry male protagonists, which I initially found abrasive, but now have grown accustomed to, I guess. 

Anyways, this one was especially interesting, because it's set in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1952, and chronicles the story of a man who is on the outs with the new regime. I am not especially knowledgeable about Egyptian history and politics, but I was really struck by the way this novel captures a sense of frustration, confusion, and malaise connected to massive political changes, and I kept thinking of it in relation to US politics of the last 10 years or so. The thing about political upheaval is that life goes on, in many ways, unchanged, but then it also doesn't. Your individual life is deeply shaped by those various forces and happenings, but there are also aspects of it that seem entirely separate (even if they aren't). There was something about the way this story see-sawed between broader social concerns and deeply selfish individual ones that was really compelling to me. And is curiously echoed in the way that I, in turn, read it as both a particular account of a specific time and place (one I know very little about — but I was dimly aware of the ways that the novel was referencing its particular moment) — and a more universal, or at least transportable, story that resonated with my own time.

 

Can't and Won't: Stories, by Lydia Davis

At the center of this collection -- and by far the longest piece in it -- is a story called The Cows. It is a collection of notes that some observer has written about the creatures in a field. It is dry, largely mundane account. Nothing really happens. The descriptions are not especially vivid; the cows do not evoke philosophical contemplation, nor do they seem to have any symbolic meaning. The account goes on for an astonishing, absurd amount of time. Long enough that you pause at least three times to think, I can't believe this is still going. And yet, it is completely riveting.

Davis has a real gift for this kind of thing; these strange, acerbic little fragments that seem so rich with meaning yet so utterly, amazingly flat. The voice has an almost unpleasant detachment, at times seeming bemused and contemptuous, at others, lonely and eager for contact, though unsure how to initiate it. There is a definite kinship to an author she has a clear proclivity for, Flaubert, though their voices are distinct: this collection contains a series of what she calls 'stories from Flaubert' that brilliantly inhabit his worldview, yet stand apart from the other pieces, even if it is difficult to say exactly how.

The queer fragments and Flaubertian tales are the high points of this collection. Somewhat weaker is are texts bearing the subheading of "a dream." Perhaps because I am currently also making my way through The Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz, which seems to be a far more successful rendition of a similar idea, I did not find them particularly compelling. But it is when Davis writes about a character that seems, unfortunately, to be rather autobiographical, that I find her completely unbearable. I had this problem with an earlier novel of hers, and it nearly put me off her altogether. There is a middle-aged, neurotic, socially awkward writer and translator who occasionally crops up in her stories and whom I find totally unsympathetic and ungodly self-absorbed. Fortunately, she makes very few appearances in this collection.

Overall, an enjoyable read, one that certainly benefits from a slow, lengthy process of periodically dipping into it. But I think some of the other collections, such as Samuel Johnson is Indignant, are better.

Arabian Nights and Days

It's difficult to review a book that one doesn't really have a fixed opinion about.
Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days is a curious work. The text reworks and interweaves the stories of 1001 Nights, but without quite creating a whole. There is a sort of framing device; the moral education of the sultan Shahriyar (husband of Scheherzade), but to see the whole book in this guise is somehow unsatisfying. It reads like a collection of tales - perhaps intended as a further nod to the original - that are loosely connected, in that they concern the inhabitants of one city, and characters reappear throughout. Furthermore, the stories are connected thematically - they all basically revolve around questions of good and evil. The basic template is that an ordinary person encounters the supernatural somehow, and this generally leads to evil-doing. There is a didactic character to these tales, but it seems rather shallow. In many cases, the character seems to basically get screwed over through no fault of his own, so the moral lesson kind of falls flat. And the stories that seem intended to provide a positive model aren't particularly compelling either.
The text is oddly flat - one would expect luscious descriptions (or maybe that's just my hidden orientalism?), but the tone is rather dry and monotone throughout. But it seems to me that for the supernatural element to be fully actualized, one needs a sense of wonder of some kind - levitation, for instance, is generally a pretty cool phenomenon, and worthy of a note of awe. Another theme throughout is the blurring of the division between dream and reality, but that somehow doesn't really work either. I guess this is the problem with the book, for me - a major theme throughout are these various dichotomies, dream/reality, reality/supernatural, sanity/insanity, good/evil, etc, but the tone throughout is so flat that it almost levels out the difference. I read the book for the class that I'm TAing for, and the professor suggested that the book wants to suggest there is something essentially human about these dichotomies and their instability, as though this dialectic is somehow what keeps people going, and while I like the idea, I don't think that the text really bears it out.
It's a difficult book to get a grip on. I was left feeling as though I must have missed something - I want to believe that there are some fascinating things buried within the novel, but I can't seem to find them. I guess I expected the text to be more self-conscious somehow, and question itself. Perhaps the idea is to leave this work for the reader, but it doesn't give you that much to go on. It's frustratingly opaque, but I'm not entirely convinced that it actually has the depth that I want to attribute to it. Ultimately, I can't seem to decide if it's much more complex than it seems to be, or much less. Unfortunately, the narrative itself isn't so gripping that I expect to lose sleep puzzling over it.

What I Read in 2008

1. The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg

2. The Coast of Chicago, Stuart Dybek

3. The Missing Piece Meets the Big O, Shel Silverstein

4. The Clown, Heinrich Böll

5. Madmen and Specialists, Wole Soyinka

6. Silk, Alessandro Baricco

7. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Jonathan Lear

8. Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle

9. Killing Johnny Fry, Walter Moseley

10. Confessions, St Augustine

11. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

12. Know What I Mean? Reflections of Hip-Hop, Michael Eric Dyson

13. Trans-Atlantyk, Witold Gombrowicz

14. Waiting for Foucault, Still, Marshall Sahlins

15. A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami

16. Inferno, Dante

17. Utopia, Thomas More

18. Where You're At, Patrick Neate

19. Shroud, John Banville

20. Candide, Voltaire

21. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley

22. RL's Dream, Walter Moseley

23. I Sailed With Magellan, Stuart Dybek

24. Grendel, John Gardner

25. Visions of Utopia, Edward Rothstein, Herbert Muschamp, Martin Marty

26. A Tale of Tub, Jonathan Swift

27. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel Delany

28. Gaelic Gothic, Luke Gibbons

29. Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki, Ignacy Krasicki

30. Zoo, Or Letters Not About Love, Victor Shklovsky

31. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift

32. The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland, Thomas Kinsella

33. Three Sisters, Brian Friel

34. The Irish Comic Tradition, Vivien Mercier

35. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

36. Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern, Joel Pfister

37. The King's of Spain's Daughter, Teresa Deevey

38. Katie Roche, Teresa Deevey

39. A World of Love, Elizabeth Bowen

40. Never No More, Maura Laverty

41. The Rising of the Moon, Lady Gregory

42. Burning of Bridget Cleary, Angela Bourke

43. The Old Lady Says "No!", Denis Johnson

44. The Country Girls, Edna O'Brien

45. Tales From Bective Bridge, Mary Lavin

46. Celtic Revivals, Seamus Deane

47. All That Fall, Samuel Beckett

48. Tono-Bungay, HG Wells

49. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

50. Whiteness of a Different Color, Matthew Frye Jacobson

51. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby

52. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, Seamus Deane, Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson

53. The Good Terrorists, Doris Lessing

54. Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje

55. Inventing Eastern Europe, Larry Wolff

56. The Quiet American, Graham Greene

57. Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, Judith Levine

58. Historia, Ignacy Krasicki

59. I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, Sinaan Anton

60. Seasons of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih

61. Dwoje Biednych Rumunów Mówiących po Polski, Dorota Masłowska

62. A Sentimental Journey, Laurence Sterne

63. The Deportees and Other Stories, Roddy Doyle

64. Seven Types of Ambiguity, Elliot Perlman

65. On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

66. A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon

67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

68. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin

69. Horse Heaven, Jane Smiley

70. Prairie State Blues, Bill Bergeron

71. Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson

72. Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie, Bożena Keff

73. The Blackwater Lightship, Colm Toibin

74. God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1946, Claude Rawson

75. The Innocent, Ian McEwan

76.  The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

77. The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

78. The King of the Fields, Isaac Bashevis Singer

79. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland, Ina Ferris

80. Belfast Confetti, Ciaran Carson

81. The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq

82. Beauty and Sadness, Yasunari Kawabata

83. Martha Quest, Doris Lessing

84. The Great Man, Kate Christensen

85. Trans-sister Radio, Chris Bohjalian

86. Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville

87. Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole

88. Lanzarote, Michel Houellebecq

89. In a Cafe, Mary Lavin

90. Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembge

91. Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua

92. Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault

93. Jonathan Swift and the Art of Raillery, Charles Peake

94. The Persian Letters, Montesquieu

95. Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, Amara Lakjous

96. Father's Music, Dermott Bolger

97. The Rabbi's Cat, Joann Sfar

98. The Shape of Utopia, Robert Elliot

99. The Rabbi's Cat 2, Joann Sfar

100. Nickel Mountain, John Gardner

101. Love and Garbage, Ivan Klima

102. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

103. Cutty, One Rock, August Kleinzahler

104. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

105. The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz

106. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

107. The Prophet, Khalil Gibran

108. Almost No Memory, Lydia Davis

109. Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, Ghassan Kanafi

(2007's list can be found here, along with an explanation of how I'm able to produce such a list)