When the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in 1988, his work had an audience of millions of readers, almost none of them in America. It too is a novel about generations of a family living in an alley in an unspecified city, presumably Cairo. The literary manner is that of myth, fable, allegory or parable, yet the effect is of the most intense actuality because Mahfouz's understanding of human psychology and history is so profound. At the end there is a new Ashur al-Nagi, who restores his family's fortunes by returning to its original ideals. Life is precious, with vast possibilities, limitless horizons.
Love is nothing more than a blind beggar, creeping around the alleyways.
Incompetent jacket copy on the galley proofs compares all of this to soap opera, an observation that has been picked up in some of the early reviews. Everything unfolds within an immemorial pattern of seasons, of weather, of risings of the Nile, of years.