Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, making him the first and still the only Arab writer to win that honor, the same year he published his last novel, The Coffeehouse. The Nobel committee’s speech cited several of his works, including his Cairo Trilogy, which the Zimbabwe International Book Fair named as one of the 12 best works of African literature in the 20th century; and Midaq Alley, which my daughter had to read for her IB English class last year.
Midaq Alley is a slice-of-life work set on one street in Cairo in the 1940s, near the close of World War II, and follows a broad array of characters as they live, work, fall in and out of love, and more. The closest we get to a protagonist is Hamida, the young foster daughter of Umm Hamida, who spends most of the novel trying to find a suitable husband – with finances high on her list of criteria, and her story intersects with those of two other residents of the Alley as well as a well-heeled visitor who sets his sights on her as soon as he arrives. The entire novel is a moment, an attempt to capture Egyptian city life as it sits on the precipice of modernity, with western influences creeping in, technology threatening some traditional jobs, and secular sentiments battling with traditional beliefs. The myriad people living on this street and on these pages are likely a stand-in for Egyptian society as a whole during the last years of the monarchy and the final years of British presence on Egyptian soil.
The alley itself is so small and life there so provincial that everyone knows everyone else’s business, which is part of how Mahfouz can pull off the constant changes in narrative and perspective – although it also seems like there are few real connections among the residents. There’s plenty of gossip, but there isn’t much love lost between them; not once does Mahfouz present us with a true friendship between any two characters, even with the large number of people who cross the page. This aspect of the book lies in the background, even when tragedy strikes at the very end of the novel, where one character makes a choice that will upend several lives yet he has nobody willing to stop him or who might have dissuaded him from his actions.
There’s clearly a lot of cultural context I missed when reading Midaq Alley, and I’m sure I would have benefited from reading it as part of a class, since I know very little of both Egyptian culture and its history outside of what we typically learn in school (ancient Egypt) or what has happened in my lifetime. I was better able to pick up some of the satirical elements, like Zaita, the “cripple-maker,” who gives beggars false deformities or disabilities so they may take in more money while panhandling, or Dr. Booshy, who isn’t a real doctor but provides medical-adjacent services at cut-rate prices and no one wants to know how. Those character archetypes are at least somewhat universal, even if the specifics are unique to Mahfouz’s world, and I could get a handle on them and what they might represent. I was also aware from the very first chapter, where a Quran-quoting poet finds himself out of a ‘job’ because the radio has effectively replaced him, that my lack of knowledge of Arab and Islamic culture would probably wall off some aspects of the novel from me. That’s on me, not the author, but the result was that I didn’t get as much out of Midaq Alley as I might have hoped.
Next up: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, another of my daughter’s books from her last year of high school, and I think her favorite.