SOURCE: “Troubled Tribe of Cairo,” in Chicago Tribune Books, July 10, 1994, p. 3.

In the following negative review, Allen criticizes Mahfouz's prose style in The Harafish.

Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz, the preeminent Arabic language novelist of his time, was born in Cairo in 1911 and remained largely unknown in cultures outside his own until receiving the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. Only a few of Mahfouz's more than 40 books of fiction had previously reached us in English translation. Since the Nobel, English-speaking readers have been treated to such colorful and distinctive novels as Midaq Alley, The Thief and the Dogs, The Beggar and, most notably, his masterly Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street, 1956–57), a vast and compelling portrayal of a star-crossed Muslim family that displays both Tolstoyan breadth and Flaubertian concentration and precision.

There's nothing limited or local about Mahfouz's art. He's a sophisticated analyst of the convolutions of...