The Cairo Trilogy

Name: The Cairo Trilogy
Author: Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz · 1956

Three volumes (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) spanning three generations of a Cairo family from WWI to WWII. Mahfouz proved that Arabic literature could sustain the full weight of the 19th-century European realist tradition while being entirely its own thing. He became the first Arabic-language Nobel laureate in 1988, largely on this work's strength.

The case against

on the pace
“Palace Walk is more like a well written forced march than a pleasure trip.”
Jake Morrissey · National Review, 19 February 1990
on the characters
“The characters in the trilogy only achieve a sort of half-life for me.”
Penelope Lively · The Spectator, 25 April 1992
on the translation
“the present translation fails to capture the spirit of the Arabic text”
Rasheed El-Enany · Third World Quarterly, January 1992
on the philosophical passages
“the novel examines states of consciousness, metaphysics, and the history of ideas, it is sententious.”
David Castronovo · Commonweal, 14 June 1991