![]() ![]() As perennial bachelor Kamal methodically visits his father's favorite brothel and frets about whether to marry, the focus of the trilogy shifts from Palace Walk to Khadija's home with Ibrahim Shawkat on Sugar Street, where the couple's sons-Abd al-Muni'm, turning toward fundamentalist Islam, and increasingly committed Communist Ahmad-argue about their duty to the country and the nature of Egyptian society, but both end meeting the same fate. Yet national politics, for all its importance as background accompaniment here (as in Palace Walk and Palace of Desire), is usually kept just offstage-"They say that Hitler has attacked," old family servant Umm Hanafi announces halfway through, and matriarch Amina's final illness coincides with a bombing raid-as Mahfouz continues to dramatize the emergence of modern Egypt through ailing family head Ahmad Abd al-Jawad's family-his sons, sensualistic Yasin and scholarly Kamal his daughters, prematurely aged widow Aisha and settled wife and mother Khadija and his five grandchildren. The final volume in Nobel laureate Mahfouz's magisterial Cairo trilogy takes the Abd al-Jawad family from a rising tide of nationalist sentiment in 1935 through the darkness and confusion of WW II, as Britain defends an Egypt officially neutral. ![]()
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