Mahfouz is one of those authors whose work I've been postponing in order to read him in the original language at some point in the future. Then I decided that not having read him at all was worse than not having read him in Arabic, though, and figured I'd start by reading the first book of his famous trilogy, in Dutch translation.

Palace Walk is the beginning of a family chronicle, about a Cairo merchant family in 1917-1919. Against the background of the tumultuous politics of these years, the Abd Al-Gawwad family goes through some large changes. The pater familias, Ahmed, is a man full of contradictions, a fun-loving epicurist among friends or lovers, but an extremely harsh and dominant figure within his family and household. Since his children have reached ages at which they are now making their own careers (the boys) or thinking about marriage (the girls), however, Ahmed's tyranny is doomed to be challenged.

The plot of the novel is relatively limited, but then the novel is more concerned with describing the mentalities and customs of the time than with a genuinely gripping plot. It describes in an impressive way the strange dichotomies in Egyptian society at the time, and to a lesser extent in many Islamic societies throughout the ages. Islam and its tenets are considered absolutely unassailable - but Ahmed Abd al-Gawwad and other men in the book see no problem in drinking large amounts of alcohol or even in constant adultery. Ahmed's wife and daughters have never even walked two blocks from their home to see the local mosque, and he gets in a frightful rage at the idea that a man should catch a glimpse of one of his daughters, yet several of his lovers are singers with lifestyles somewhat reminiscent of the Moulin Rouge. The point is not just, as one might think reading this, that Ahmed is a raging hypocrite, though, as his character is described rather positively on the whole. It is the entire society that functions this way, and the most notable aspect of this book is the way Mahfouz makes it all credible - makes us see how someone like Ahmed can act as he does and yet not feel that he is a bad man, a bad Muslim or a hypocrite.

Mahfouz also creates credible and well-fleshed out characters, at least for the family members. They all suffer from Ahmed's tyranny - perhaps even including Ahmed himself, who is depicted as a genuinely kind man in general, who is almost forced to be a tyrant in his house because he feels that's what society expects of him, even though most of his friends seem to be more relaxed about such things. A lot of charades, deceptions and lies are employed by the other family members to try to do various things without Ahmed's knowledge, usually unsuccessfully, and the almost child-like happiness displayed by all of them on the rare occasions that they get genuinely kind words from him is heart-wrenching, but quite realistic I would think. Still, the children - I say children, but four of the five are actually young adults, which makes little difference as long as they live at home - have their secret dreams and desires, and try to find ways to fulfill those. The mother's character, genuinely devoted to her husband and woefully ignorant on so many levels, elicits compassion but also admiration - the scenes in which she comments on politics in her naive, rather clueless way as her highly educated and politically active son listens with annoyance, and shame for that annoyance, are excellent.

One might say in terms of criticism that Mahfouz sometimes does too much explicit explaining of things better shown through more subtle means, but on the other hand, this helps a modern Western reader to understand things that might otherwise seem incomprehensible. My translation also included a number of footnotes to clarify other things that Mahfouz didn't need to explain, but his translators do - Qur'an references, typically Egyptian concepts and explanations about political references, although those last ones at least weren't necessary for me. As it happens, I'd recently studied the political events mentioned in the novel, not really in detail, but enough to have a pretty good idea of what was going on. So for me, that made it all the more interesting - seeing what life in the Egyptian middle class was like at the time of these events, and how said middle class saw them. Other readers might want to read a few Wikipedia articles on the topic before starting the novel, although I don't think it's absolutely necessary.

I don't imagine anyone here will read the Dutch translation, so this paragraph will probably not be too relevant for anyone, but I'll comment on the quality of the translation anyway. I know Arabic well enough to realize how difficult it must be to translate a novel like this, and how often one must have difficulties finding a compromise between faithfully translating the original text, and producing a dialogue or speech that sounds remotely credible. Still, I think the translator could and should have done a better job. Too many sentences sound utterly unnatural - I often have a vague idea of what the Arabic original must have been, but in Dutch, they just don't work. This is particularly true for the translations of the humour and the teasing, fairly frequently used in the book. Certainly, one should try to preserve the gist of what is said even when the humour is odd and not really that funny to Western ears, but at least it should be translated in more naturally flowing ways.

Palace Walk is a very good novel and makes clear that Mahfouz' fame and that of his trilogy in particular is well-founded (though part of that is simply that he is among the first great Arab novelists and the only Arab Noble Prize winner to this day). I will definitely read the next two books in the trilogy, but I'll have to see if I can't do that in Arabic, or else hope that the French or English translation is less stulted.