A giant in Egyptian literature. I read his Maze of Justice some years ago and enjoyed it. Not this one. It was first published in 1933 and is touted as the story of the 1919 Revolution (throwing off the yoke of the colonial British government). Either I am an incompetent reader (a distinct possibility) or this has virtually nothing to do with the coming of the 1919 Revolution except that it covers the period shortly before it. Advertised as “a trailblazing political novel that illustrates the way one man's spiritual awakening ties to a political awakening of a nation,” it is actually the story of a boy who falls in love with his next-door neighbor, a woman a few years too old for him. That “relationship” is the most significant portion of the book, the remainder being primarily taken up with the lives and tribulations of the people in the house in which the boy lives. His rich parents in the countryside make a brief appearance and the customers of a café across the street make occasional appearances. The Revolution appears out of nowhere in the last dozen or two dozen pages; they are almost as if tacked on from another book. The only connection to what came before is the same characters as witnesses to the eruption of violence. To the extent that the “love story” is a metaphor for the Egyptian people under the British yoke, I never got it.
The book wasn’t particularly well-written and the translation struck me as a poor job. William Maynard Hutchins, a major translator—indeed, he translated Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy” into English among other things—did the translation. It seems that he must have done the Mahfouz at the same time and there is no doubt in my mind where his attention was. It reads too often as if he simply sleepwalked through it. The English is occasionally stilted, ungrammatical, and just difficult. A sad job of translating and a grave disappointment of a book. (That said, I’d be very curious to hear from someone else who has read it to make certain I’m not just blind to something.) ( )