Autumn Quail

About the Author\nNaguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, his works range from reimaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. Over a career that lasted more than five decades, he wrote 33 novels, 13 short story anthologies, numerous plays, and 30 screenplays. Of his many works, most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations, from 1917 until 1952. In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in Arabic to do so. He died in August 2006.\nFrom the Trade Paperback edition.\nLanguage Notes\nText: English (translation)
Original Language: Arabic\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nSet during the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and the years immediately following, this 1962 novel by the Nobel laureate focuses on Isa, a senior civil servant during the last days of the monarchy, pensioned off after the upheaval for having taken bribes. "Although my mind is sometimes convinced by the revolution, my heart is always with the past. I just don't know if there can be any settlement between the two," says Isa, who abides his own peculiar moral code. Refusing to join his hypocritical friends in kowtowing to the new regime, he spurns the connections offered by his cousin Hasan, a key player in the infant republic, and becomes a nonentity; Hasan subsequently wins the hand of Isa's fiancee, Salwa, whose influential father and whose "sweet gentle expression that showed not only a kindly temperament but also an almost total lack of intelligence or warmth" makes her a coveted commodity. Isa's perhaps honorable career choice is later counterpointed by his despicable treatment of a prostitute whom he impregnatedpk , and of his barren wife. As translator Allen admits, the novel suffers from a falsely optimistic, contrived ending (Mahfouz may have been pleasing the "official cultural sector" to which he himself belonged) and from its coverage of an extended, four-year time period.
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