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 pointed out in the Times Literary Supplement (21–27 October 1988), Mahfouz has fashioned a language “that combines the resonance of traditional Arabic rhetoric with the racy eloquence of Arab speech; a version of Arabic that delights the ear tuned to the classics and yet is accessible to the most basically tutored of school-leavers.” Yet how can such nuances be rendered in English, a language notorious for the nearness of its spoken and written forms? Even the most sensitive translator will inevitably bludgeon the innovative craftsmanship of Mahfouz's prose.

Secondly, Mahfouz's fifty-odd novels and collections of short stories—he was born in 1911 and has been publishing since the late 1930s—reveal an astonishing evolution. The reader of just one of these three important novels simultaneously published by Doubleday, for example, can hardly gain a sufficiently broad impression of the author's pioneering contribution to Arabic letters. All three books must be read, and perhaps still others from among the several now available in English.

For if The Beginning and the End, written in 1942–43 and published in 1949, belongs to an early period in which through a series of outstanding realist novels Mahfouz examined the social forces coming to bear on modern Egypt and in particular on its middle class, a recent novel such as Wedding Song, published in 1981, illustrates the author's current interest in bold narrative experimentation. If the former, in its depiction of a Cairene family struggling to survive after the father's untimely death, reminds us of (say) Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie or An American Tragedy, then the latter novel adroitly employs four narrators to determine, from their disparate viewpoints, the truths and falsehoods expressed in a scandalous play written by one of them about himself and the three others, who are actors in it. Thus Wedding Song is in effect a play in four acts, about a play. The reader can only do his best to disentangle reality from the manifold curtains of illusion.

The Thief and the Dogs, first issued in 1961, displays still another of this protean writer's qualities. In a novella reminiscent of Camus's or Sartre's existentialist fiction, Mahfouz portrays Said Mahran's attempts after his release from prison, to get even with the three people who betrayed him: his wife, a former friend, and a now embourgeoisé newspaperman who had been a political mentor to him during their years as young revolutionary activists. As in the best examples of the genre, the ambiguous hero is at once repulsive in his deeds and attractive in his idealism; above all, the book poses fundamental moral questions that are continually reshaped as the suspenseful plot advances.

Perhaps some readers will find, especially in Mahfouz's earlier, longer fiction, that themes are too quickly introduced, even if subsequently deepened, or that characters are too immediately symbolic. Mahfouz has a philosophical bent of mind, and sometimes his ideas, their complexity notwithstanding, dominate passages that might have been devoted to more meticulous description or to subtle emotional evocation. Occasionally missing in his social panoramas is that rich variety of stylistic effect, ever in equilibrium, that one associates with a Henry James or a Thomas Mann.

Yet this initial ploy lies at the very heart of Mahfouz's art, which is one of quickly establishing his characters' souls as symbols, then of slowly revealing the hidden, contradictory dimensions within. Likewise the seemingly transparent moral predicaments confronting his protagonists gradually take on a disquieting opacity. If at first a few potential acts hold out hope to the characters, eventually even these options are removed or, better, exposed in all their desperate equivocacy. At the end of the reading, one is surprised at how black Mahfouz's world has become, rather as one can be surprised, having day-dreamed throughout the late afternoon, that the sun set long ago and that it is thoroughly black all around.