Those readers in the Western world who have enjoyed the process of being introduced through Naguib Mahfouz's great family saga to the life and culture of Egyptian society between the two world wars will need little incentive to follow the tale to its conclusion in the final volume of The Cairo Trilogy under review here. Al-Sukkariyyah, the third novel in the series, originally published in 1957 and now translated as Sugar Street, rounds off the narrative in a manner common to all realistic sagas such as this, neatly tying up most of the loose ends. The family patriarch, Ahmad ‘Abd al-Gawwad, dies one night during an air raid. Secular universities have now opened, and men and women attend the same classes. The patriarch's grandsons have both become involved in the politics of opposition in Egypt as it endeavors to cope with the short-term issues of war and foreign occupation and the more long-term matters of political systems and contemporary morality. As this novel and the trilogy end, both grandsons are in prison: one as a communist, the other a member of the Muslim Brethren.

The situation in Egypt before the 1952 revolution can hardly have been more effectively symbolized; and yet, in an echo of Henry James's dissatisfaction with such unreal mirrors of “reality,” Mahfouz also chooses to leave the political dimension open and unresolved—a decision the prescience of which he cannot have fully realized at the time of writing. Al-Sukkariyyah was completed in April 1952, just months before the revolution, but was only published some five years later when Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir (Nasser) was establishing himself as a major Third World leader. Whatever may have been the vagaries and practicalities of publication that Mahfouz had to face with such a huge manuscript, the appearance of his trilogy of novels could hardly have been better timed to suit the political moment.

Mahfouz's trilogy was the topic of much attention at the time of his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, and its publication in English translation has done much to bring it a broader reading public. In this context, however, it is important to note first that the work represents a middle stage in the literary career of a novelist who continued to develop his craft into the 1960s and beyond, and second, that the chronological gap between the publication of the trilogy and the award of the Nobel Prize is thirty-one years. I have explored some of the issues raised by this situation in a lengthy article in Edebiyat (New Series, 4:1, pp. 87–117). Suffice it to say here that, even within the context of the trilogy, Al-Sukkariyyah shows a development in technique over the two volumes previous to it (translated as Palace Walk [1990] and Palace of Desire [1991]), most especially in its use of dialogue and modes of conveying introspection.

The English translation has succeeded to a substantial degree in conveying most of the narrative qualities of what is, from a contemporary perspective, a very traditional piece of fictional writing (whence the possibility of making the rather silly references to Mahfouz as the Dickens/Balzac of Cairo). There is, however, one area in which, in my view, the English versions of the three novels do not succeed: their titles. In an era in which the “Orientalism” debate has served to make us more aware of the often negative effects caused by the ways in which cultures picture one another, the decision to use literal translations of the names of Cairo streets and districts as titles for the English versions of the novels without due consideration being given to their impact in the target culture needs, I believe, to be vigorously challenged. Why must one translate the names of streets in Cairo and not those of, say, Paris or Berlin? The question becomes particularly urgent when the Western reader is confronted with English titles that are laden with the most inappropriate allusive potential, such as Palace of Desire and—perhaps the most problematic of all three—Sugar Street (whence my preference for the Arabic title in this review).

In the case of the third novel in the trilogy the problem is compounded by the utter inappropriateness of the cover. It shows a period photograph of Sulaiman Pasha (now Tal‘at Harb) Square, one of the focal points of the nineteenth-century quarter of Cairo known as Isma‘iliyya, built as a copy of the street plan of central Paris. Readers of the novel will, of course, be aware that it is set in one of medieval Cairo's older quarters. Fortunately, they can now assess for themselves the sheer incongruity of the image to be found on the cover by consulting a recent photographic essay on Cairo by Peter Theroux, which, acknowledging the title of Mahfouz's novel, includes a picture of the street called al-Sukkariyyah (National Geographic Magazine, April 1993, pp. 58–59).

With the publication of this third volume in The Cairo Trilogy, teachers of world literature can rejoice in the fact that Mahfouz's period masterpiece is now available complete in English translation. However, one may perhaps be allowed to express the hope that the availability of it and other works of modern Arabic fiction will participate in the process of fostering a change in some of those very cultural attitudes in the West that have impinged upon the manner in which it has been presented to a Western readership.