I finished Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz in March and wrote the first draft of this review shortly after. Somehow I never got around to polishing and posting the final version, though. The file kept staring at me from my desktop every time I switched my computer on, annoying me but also making me realize that I do still want to blog about the book. In an attempt to clean up my growing to-do list somewhat and to get rid of this ‘demon’, I decided to finally post the review. Actually, re-reading the draft just now, I didn’t find there was a lot of revising to do, below is pretty much the draft as it was. Which makes me wonder even more: Why did I postpone posting this so long? Ah, the wonders of procrastination….
Warning: If you plan to read the first two books in the trilogy, Palace Walk and Palace of Desire any time soon, you might want to skip this review. I will do my very best to make it spoiler-free, but it might contain hints as to things that happened in the previous two books. It is very difficult to talk about these books without at least hinting to some events or storylines from other parts of the series.
This third book in the Cairo Trilogy was indeed the first book I read after I came back from Holland, as I predicted it would be. Though I did enjoy it and the book is by no means bad, I found Sugar Street to be the weakest of the three books by far. Which, I emphasize, is not to say that it is a bad book. Neither did I feel that this third part was a disappointment after reading two excellent books. It was good, just not as good as Palace Walk and Palace of Desire. But since the three books don’t stand alone and really need to be read together and in order, once you’ve read and liked the first two, you’ll read Sugar Street as well anyway, I suppose.
I think there are two reasons for Sugar Street being the weakest (in my opinion at least) of the three books. First, Mahfouz covers much more time, almost ten years, in fewer pages than he did in the first two books. The second reason is that there is lots of discussing Egyptian politics in the story, which not so much distracted me, as didn’t really push the story forward.
Sugar Street picks up seven years after the end of Palace of Desire, in 1934. Yasin is still happily married to his third wife, who has become respected and more or less accepted by the rest of the family. Kamal has remained unmarried and he has turned into an introverted recluse – I would say one who is not very good at expressing or dealing with his emotions. He has become a teacher of English and writes articles about philosophy for a somewhat obscure magazine. Khadija and her family are doing well, her two sons now teenagers, about to start university. Aisha has become a physical and emotional wreck after the death of her two sons and husband. All she has left is her beautiful, vain and not too bright (or so it seemed to me) daughter Naima. Mother Amina and father Ahmad have grown older. Ahmad and his three life-long friends have had to give up his life of parties, drinking and women because of health reasons. The four friends now meet in the evenings to drink tea together and Ahmad returns home early, long before midnight.
A new generation in the form of Naima, Yasin’s two children and Khadija’s two sons has been added to the story, with a lot of the storyline focusing on them growing up and finding their place in life. This does not always go according to the plan their parents had in mind: one of them turns into a staunch religious man, one into a socialist who marries a woman several years older than he and from a different social class, and one doesn’t want to get married at all, because he is gay. Throw in a few more family tragedies and you have enough to fill a book. Like Palace Walk and Palace of Desire, Sugar Street ends with death as well.
Sugar Street has a feeling of demise, of old ways dying. This is very obviously (more so than in the previous two books) the history of a conservative family trying to survive in a changing and modernizing world – remember, the book is roughly set in the years 1934-1944. Ultimately the family fails in this, as is obvious from the choices the youngest generation makes.
As I mentioned above, despite this being the weakest book of the three, I still enjoyed it immensely and the Cairo Trilogy firmly stays in my top ten of most favorite books. Fortunately, I have more books from Naguib Mahfouz to look forward to, as I found another one of those beautiful Everyman’s Library editions of his work when I was in Holland a few weeks ago. This volume contains Mahfouz’ three novels of ancient Egypt: Khufo’s Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia and Thebes at War.
On a related note: I recently started following a blog called Gender Across Borders. A few days ago it had a blogpost about feminism in early 20th century Egypt, roughly the time of The Cairo Trilogy.
My reviews of Palace Walk and Palace of Desire are here and here.
51 Stories recently read and reviewed the Cairo Trilogy as well. Her blogposts are here and here.
If you read Sugar Street or any of the other two books in the trilogy, leave a comment with a link to your review and I’ll add it to the post.
Probably my favorite fiction read of last year was Syrian author Rafik Schami’s 
We follow Wang Lung and O-lan through their initial years of poverty and their later years of prosperity, when Wang Lung becomes a successful farmer who is even able to buy land from the Hwang family, whose fortunes by that time have gone down, until Wang Lung’s final years when he is living in the same house where the Hwangs used to live and from where he once, long ago collected his bride. This interconnection between the fates of the two families is one of the recurring themes throughout the book.
In Europa - Geert Mak
Kindertijd Jeugdjaren Jongelingschap (Childhood Boyhood Youth) - Lev Tolstoy
