SOURCE: “More Incident than an Egyptian Soap,” in Spectator, July 2, 1994, p. 35.

In the following review, King offers a mixed assessment of The Harafish.

The finest achievement of Naguib Mahfouz is his Cairo trilogy, written in the late Forties and early Fifties and in my view the greatest work of realistic fiction to be produced since the War. No doubt it was this trilogy which led one Western critic to call him ‘the Balzac of Egypt’ and another ‘the Dickens of the Cairo cafés,’ and the Committee of the Nobel Prize for Literature to make him its laureate in 1988.

Inevitably, after the award of the Prize, a novelist whom the reference books had up to then ignored became world-famous. No less inevitably some critics lost their heads—with Edward Said declaring hyperbolically in the London Review of Books: ‘He is not only a Hugo and a Dickens but...