SOURCE: “On Holiday,” in London Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 14, July 21, 1994, p. 12.

In the following review, Chaudhuri explores the parallels between Palace Walk and The Harafish.

Naguib Mahfouz made his name with his trilogy of Cairo life—Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street—first published in Arabic in the late Fifties. At first glance, The Harafish, which was originally published in 1977, bears little resemblance to, say, Palace Walk. The latter is a story of a family in an ‘alley’ in Cairo in the first half of the 20th century, and is told in a straightforward chronological manner that seems to owe something to the 19th-century European novel. The Harafish is more rambling, less realistic (without being ‘magical’), telling the mythic story of the descendants of the heroic Ashur-al-Nagi and covering births, weddings, murders and entire generations, sometimes in the course of a chapter. It is set...