SOURCE: “Life along the Nile,” in Commonweal, Vol. CXVIII, No. 12, June 14, 1991, pp. 410–11.

In the following review, Castronova offers a positive assessment of Palace of Desire.

This grand-scale novel of Cairo life in the 1920s—weighing in with the heft and detail of a nineteenth-century chronicle—is the second part of Nobel laureate Mahfouz's family trilogy about the middle classes between the wars. The books were first published in 1956–57, but are still news to most of us. They are copious reports from the Arabic world given humane depth and artistic harmony by a tolerant, witty, urbane observer of small scenes and large patterns. The first volume of the trilogy, Palace Walk, focuses on Ahmad al-Sayyid, a prosperous retail merchant whose tyrannical domestic regime, decorous business life, and late-night pleasures with cronies and lute girls provide the narrative with its tensions. A man with an infinite capacity for compartmentalizing and...