by Naguib Mahfouz
This was my first experience of reading Mahfouz. Like most works in translation, it loses some of what one presumes to be its characteristic quality when rendered in English. Arabic is a notoriously difficult language for translators to work with.
I thought this was a pretty good book. When reading fiction from cultures beyond the Western world (and Japan), especially in translation, it is important to moderate one’s expectations concerning style, form and technique; the novel – and even more so, the short story – are alien forms in most of these cultures, and the writers are learning (mostly from outdated Western European or Russian models) as they go along. In terms of stylistic and technical development, Karnak Café, published in 1971, might have been written forty years previously; it makes one think of Goodbye to Berlin with its engaged but faceless, cipher-like first-person narrator. Or maybe Kafka without the absurdism (and the jokes).
But Mahfouz get a lot of things right; there’s a lot of art and insight packed into this slim novel. Its timeline covers a few months or years on either side of the Six Day War of 1967, a conflict whose outcome deeply shocked and humiliated Arabs, and particularly Egyptians, and which is known in Arabic as al Naksa, ‘The Setback’. As a Sri Lankan, I have had to live with the erosion of the rule of law, civil society and freedom in my own country, which began in 1970 and continued well into the present century. In Egypt, this all happened much faster and was, no doubt, correspondingly more surreal and nightmarish. Mahfouz captures those qualities of the process well, together with the astonished paralysis of those who suddenly find everything – one’s job, one’s relationships to other people, the customary and legal boundaries one has always respected, one’s moral code itself – swept away by the malfeasance and corruption of the state, which has for largely spurious reasons declared people like yourself its enemy. He also shows how this malfeasance and corruption infect everything they touch, most particularly their victims.
It happens almost naturally, in everyday life, to ordinary people: in this case, the habituées of a Cairo cafe run by a retired belly-dancer, Qurunfula. We follow the progress of their condition through anxiety and terror to hopelessness and ultimately, acceptance and subornment. A number of incarcerations and interrogations are reported, but always in retrospect – accounts given by the victims after their release, in conversation at the cafe, with the worst abuses and atrocities decently veiled in allusions and ellipses. Yet enough is revealed, and commented upon, to have caused some Arab reviewers to describe Karnak Café as ‘Mahfouz’s angriest book’.
Qurunfula herself is an obvious metaphor for modern Egypt, desperate to retain her integrity yet given to falling in love with unsuitable characters and entertaining implausible hopes. Her various would-be lovers seem to represent the various ideas Egyptians have had about their country and its politics; in the end, she has either done with them all, or they have, seemingly, done with her; yet as the novel ends she is somehow full of hope for the future.
Considering the state of Egypt today, almost half a century later, that is probably the saddest thing about this distinguished literary work from an equally distinguished author.
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