[In the following mixed review, Allen discusses both the stories and the translation of Fountain and Tomb.]

Published by an act of providence at almost the same moment as the announcement of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, Fountain and Tomb is a translation of Hikayat haratina (1975). The title's literal meaning is “Tales of Our Quarter,” and the word quarter links the work with at least two others by Naguib Mahfouz (also frequently written Najib Mahfuz): the infamous novel Awlad haratina (“Children of Our Quarter”; 1959/1967; translated into English as Children of Gebelawi; see WLT 56:2, p. 398), and “‘Ushshaq al-hara” (“Lovers' Quarter”) from the short-story collection Hikaya bi-la bidaya wa-la nihaya (1971). As Shams al-din Musa shows in a recent article in Arabic for Afaq ‘Arabiyya (11, November 1988) on the “dimension of the quarter” in Mahfouz's fictional works, the use of the word hara in those works carries with it a strong symbolic resonance. The decision of the translators to alter the title is thus not only a substantial piece of interpretive license, but also a missed opportunity to link the present work with others in his oeuvre. The problem is somewhat compounded when the very word hara itself is wrongly translated as “alley” on pages 112 and 114. To be sure, it can have such a meaning; yet when the resulting sentence reads, “But I can cross the whole alley in fifteen minutes,” we can be reasonably certain that the hara being referred to is that larger symbolic entity “the quarter,” sadly missing from the English title.

Fountain and Tomb is a collection of stories which are told in numerical sequence from the perspective of a first-person narrator. At times and particularly at the beginning, the perspective is that of a child, but elsewhere there is a shift to a more adult vision. All the stories are short, some extremely so, almost like fleeting impressions. They present a picture of “the quarter,” a microcosm of Egyptian life during the earlier decades of this century (there are specific references to the riots which accompanied the British expulsion of the Egyptian nationalist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul in 1919). Many of the tales concern relationships between men and women: childhood loves, illicit affairs, arranged marriages, and family feuds. There is a string of tales in the core of the book concerning the futuwwat, the thug gangs which are so much a topic of the earlier Children of Gebelawi. The entire set of stories is framed by reference to the takiya, the Sufi retreat, which remains as much a mystery to the narrator at the end of the work as it was to the child who narrates its beginning.

Hikayat haratina is problematic from the generic perspective. Its first printing described it as “short stories,” but in subsequent publications it was characterized as “characters and situations” (shakhsiyyat wa-mawaqif). At some point between the appearance of the novel Qalb allayl (Heart of the Night; 1975) and Al-Hubb fawq hadbat al-haram (Love on Pyramid Hill; 1979) the work was redefined yet again as a “novel” (riwaya). On the basis of my own experience, one should not assume that the change was made with the author's knowledge or approval. In the introduction to Fountain and Tomb the book is said to be “a novel disguised as a collection of tales.” No reasons are advanced for this description (for which, even allowing for elasticity of novelistic definitions, I can find no justification in the work itself); it is merely one of a number of pieces of unsubstantiated interpretation to be found in the introduction, much of which should be read with extreme caution. What, for example, are the particular features of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky which lead them to be singled out as models for “The Trilogy?”

The translation itself was awarded the 1986 Arab League Translation Prize. Apart from some minor infelicities close to the beginning, it flows along with considerable fluency, capturing the carefully nuanced style of Mahfouz very well. Thus, although Fountain and Tomb is clearly not one of the author's more outstanding contributions to modern Arabic fiction, it can provide Western readers with a “slice of life,” Egyptian style, which is pleasant enough to read.