[In the following review, Castronova offers a positive assessment of Palace of Desire.]

This grand-scale novel of Cairo life in the 1920s—weighing in with the heft and detail of a nineteenth-century chronicle—is the second part of Nobel laureate Mahfouz's family trilogy about the middle classes between the wars. The books were first published in 1956–57, but are still news to most of us. They are copious reports from the Arabic world given humane depth and artistic harmony by a tolerant, witty, urbane observer of small scenes and large patterns. The first volume of the trilogy, Palace Walk, focuses on Ahmad al-Sayyid, a prosperous retail merchant whose tyrannical domestic regime, decorous business life, and late-night pleasures with cronies and lute girls provide the narrative with its tensions. A man with an infinite capacity for compartmentalizing and rationalizing, he bullies his way through life using custom, bits of the Koran, and his personal magnetism to keep things in order.

The second installment situates the rogue-patriarch against the background of deteriorating traditions, filial insubordination, and the rising tide of nationalism and resentment of British domination. While Palace Walk is principally set in the old neighborhood of narrow streets, coffee houses, stands of snack and drink vendors, and lattice-work balconies protecting women from the public sphere, Palace of Desire opens out and becomes a social study that encompasses the drawing rooms of merchant princes, the boulevards of the new part of town, and the challenges to Ahmad's small world of comfortable compromise. When the third volume appears next year in English, Mahfouz's chronicle will have reached World War II, the conflicts of liberated grandchildren, and the issue of communism in Egypt.

The title, Palace of Desire, refers to the alley where Yasin, Ahmad's grown son by his first marriage, has his household and conducts his updated, ironically presented version of the well-lived life, in his case a clumsy parody of the father's more discreet philandering. The young man—an “ox” to his adroit father—has damaged the family reputation by divorcing in a messy way and threatening family connections and dignity. Mahfouz makes him the most obvious victim of passion, a comic loser who moves from scandal to scandal.

The younger children and their mother Amina, a woman sequestered from the world and yearning to please the master of the house, fill out the family picture. As the chronicle resumes in this volume—a self-contained, entirely clear story by itself—we are reminded of the aspirations of son Fahmy, a young law student killed in a nationalist protest in Palace Walk. His ardor and idealism are passed on to his brother Kamal, a philosophy student whose desires distill the modern humanist program of political liberation, scientific progress, sustaining love, and beauty in the arts. While the father's coarse pleasures take on a pathetic aspect as he chases a young singer and keeps her on a houseboat on the Nile, Kamal pursues cosmopolitan Aïda, a Proustian heartbreaker who comes from the upper middle class and represents the unattainable. (Mahfouz, known for his admiration of Proust, offers interior monologues of Kamal's unrequited love and self loathing that read like heavy-handed imitations of Charles Swann's agonies.) Meanwhile Kamal's sisters have done the socially correct thing by marrying the elite Shawkat brothers, two lazy ciphers. Aisha is a slender, pliable girl who tolerates the domination of the wizened widow Shawkat; her plump sister Khadija—an assertive, caustic, insightful young woman—wants to be an autonomous self, a woman with her own kitchen within her mother-in-law's household. Mahfouz raises one in-law joke to an art form as he stages battles over who knew the recipe for Circassian chicken first and who is most deferential to an old lady. His treatment of the fat-thin issue is worthy of a French structuralist (one with a good prose style like Claude Levi-Strauss); it's a complicated debate about power, femininity and masculinity, the outward sings of inner worth and substance, the traditional order and progress. Altogether Mahfouz has a magnificent command of the customs and manners that add up to a culture and a people's desires.

This book's coloration and variety are achieved with grace and ease. You move through the pages, relishing the diversity and hardly realizing that you're contending with a bulky monster of a narrative. In creating his discrete Cairo scenes—the elegant or noisy or sordid quarters of the city, the conversations during Amina's coffee hour, or the patrician banter at Aïda's parents' gazebo—Mahfouz employs the classic, orderly articulation of the storyteller who knows his people inside out. There are no ellipses or experiments, just the familiar interior musings of characters who seem to think in bursts of emotion or rhetorical lights. This book, to be sure, has little to do with the techniques of the literary modernists. It is as clear and shrewd as the accounts of people's lives given by an inspired and trustworthy raconteur in a cafe. Mahfouz himself goes to his favorite cafe regularly to talk politics and listen to gossip.

Yet while the reader is on familiar Balzacian ground, it should be added that one ground is sometimes rather flat and predictable. The ideas as advanced by Kamal—about Darwin, nihilism, self-determination—are curiously dated. Mahfouz only springs philosophical issues to life if they are wordly or political. The exiled politician Sa‘d Zaghlul, a dynamic nationalist, is made into a powerful symbol of thwarted ambition, a counterpoint to the frustration in private lives. Aïda's brother is an image of decadence, a brilliant emblem of those whose values are Ottoman and detached from Egyptian national identity.

When the novel examines states of consciousness, metaphysics, and the history of ideas, it is sententious. Mahfouz is better on collisions than on musings. It's the wit, irony, and rich sense of incongruity in life that make Palace of Desire an important novel of civilization. Mahfouz has performed a great service to world literature by offering such a complexly ambivalent view of people. In our present period of vaguely focused curiosity and thinly veiled distrust of the Islamic mind and self, Mahfouz satirizes and analyzes without reducing the humanity of his characters. A splendid scene toward the end—with Ahmad recovering from a stroke and receiving visits from his pals and neighbors, the crude and ascetic—shows Mahfouz's gift: “They almost seemed like slivers of his heart.”