Apr. 15th, 2015 05:07 pm
Taking on the Big Man
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muckefuckI know Blondie's always trying to keep up with literature published in Arabic, so I guessed he'd have heard of al-Aswany as well and I was right. He even tried to read him until he came to the conclusion that he was famous less for the quality of his writing and more on account of his political stand. (He went on to help form the Egyptian Movement for Change, which was riven by dissent after the 2005 elections and ultimately swept into irrelevance by the protests in in Tahrir Square.) When I asked him about Yacoubian Building, he asked in turn, "You know Naguib Mahfouz?" He'd had exactly the same thoughts about its inferior relationship to Midaq Alley as I did.
Makes me want to reread Mahfouz' novel to remind myself just how much better it was. It's true the doyen of Egyptian letters paints with a narrower canvas than al-Aswany, who tries to give us a glimpse into the covert operations of both the deep state and the militias which oppose it, but that's part of what makes his work more successful. He's not attempting anything so grandiose as sketching a portrait of all of Egyptian society at a particular point in time.
Besides his less salacious treatment of females and more sympathetic approach to sodomy (the male lovers in Midaq Alley may end up unhappy, but at least they both live), the thing that most strikes me about Mahfouz' work vis-à-vis al-Aswany's is the restricted role of religion. It's a part of his character's lives, but it's far from their overriding concern, let alone the ideological driver that it becomes for one of Yacoubian's antiheroes. al-Aswany devotes quite a few pages to explaining how homespun piety came to oust secularism and cosmopolitianism in the decades following the overthrow of the monarchy; Mahfouz just takes those values for granted.
I'm now reaching another of those lulls where nothing is really demanding my attention. I still pan to finish The informer, but I think when I do that will officially bring Irish Reading Season to a close. I could stay with Egypt for a while--I have at least four unread Mahfouz novels sitting around, not to mention a volume of short stories from Soueif--or I could make a lateral move to Turkey and finally tackle Tanpınar. But is that really what I want? Damn you, Spring, with your indecisive wanderlusts!
Makes me want to reread Mahfouz' novel to remind myself just how much better it was. It's true the doyen of Egyptian letters paints with a narrower canvas than al-Aswany, who tries to give us a glimpse into the covert operations of both the deep state and the militias which oppose it, but that's part of what makes his work more successful. He's not attempting anything so grandiose as sketching a portrait of all of Egyptian society at a particular point in time.
Besides his less salacious treatment of females and more sympathetic approach to sodomy (the male lovers in Midaq Alley may end up unhappy, but at least they both live), the thing that most strikes me about Mahfouz' work vis-à-vis al-Aswany's is the restricted role of religion. It's a part of his character's lives, but it's far from their overriding concern, let alone the ideological driver that it becomes for one of Yacoubian's antiheroes. al-Aswany devotes quite a few pages to explaining how homespun piety came to oust secularism and cosmopolitianism in the decades following the overthrow of the monarchy; Mahfouz just takes those values for granted.
I'm now reaching another of those lulls where nothing is really demanding my attention. I still pan to finish The informer, but I think when I do that will officially bring Irish Reading Season to a close. I could stay with Egypt for a while--I have at least four unread Mahfouz novels sitting around, not to mention a volume of short stories from Soueif--or I could make a lateral move to Turkey and finally tackle Tanpınar. But is that really what I want? Damn you, Spring, with your indecisive wanderlusts!
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