SOURCE: A review of The Beginning and the End, The Thief and the Dogs, and Wedding Song, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 2, Summer, 1990, p. 266.

In the following positive review of The Beginning and the End, The Thief and the Dogs, and Wedding Song, Taylor describes several reasons why American audiences cannot fully appreciate Mahfouz's work.

The writings of the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, are unlikely to create strong first impressions on those of us approaching his work only through translations. First of all, there is the problem of translation itself. In terms of style, Mahfouz is famous for having brilliantly resolved the linguistic dilemma facing Arab writers, namely the choice between “classical” Arabic—rooted in the Koran and the magnificent corpus of pre-Islamic literature—and the exceedingly different spoken idiom of the people. Indeed, as the critic Ahdaf Soueif...