Sugar Street (Cairo Trilogy Book 3)

The final book in The Cairo Trilogy begins about eight years after the close of the previous volume and provides, somewhat, an end to the story begun many pages ago in Palace Walk. My initial enthusiasm for the trilogy has been somewhat dimmed as the author tried espousing the opposing political

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views at that time, which did not provide for a driving narrative. The tyrannical patriarch of the first volume, al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, is now an old man, sick and confined to his bed for the most part, his lively band of friends, either dead or soon to be. As vile a character as he initially was, he’s now a shell of his former self and I actually missed the stories of his antics that had provided so much of the interest of the previous books.

His son Kamal is no live wire either. Although it has been years since the love of his life (who never returned his affection) has been married and living in Europe, he still dwells on thoughts of her and ends up actually stalking her younger sister, unable to actually make an advance to her that might result in an actual relationship. She eventually gives up on him and marries another. And Amina, the humble, untiring wife of Ahmad, who wanted only to be able to visit the shrine and pray has also changed:

”Visits to the al-Husayn and to the other saints and their shrines were the only relief she found. Thanks to al-Sayid Ahmad, who no longer restricted her movements, she was allowed to hurry off to God’s sanctuaries whenever she felt the need. Amina herself was no longer the same woman she has once been. Grief and ill-health had changed her considerably. With the passing years she had lost her amazing diligence and her extraordinary capacity for tidying up, cleaning and running her home.” (Page 6)

Most of the narrative focuses on Kamal’s sister Khadija’s sons, their generation and the political upheaval occurring in Egypt in the waning years of WWII. Abd al-Muni'm and Ahmad choose entirely different paths in life, Ahmad becoming a journalist with Marxist ties and, much to his mother’s chagrin, he chooses to marry a working woman who holds the same views. Abd al-Munim, on the other hand, is a fundamentalist Muslim who joins the Muslim Brethren and marries a very traditional choice---his Uncle Yasin’s daughter. Yasin’s son, Ridwan, rises quickly in the ranks of the bureaucracy, quickly surpassing his father and Uncle Kamal, not because of his skills but, rather, because of his inclusion in a homosexual faction that he happily becomes a part of.

With the emphasis on this new generation, which we learn about very quickly over a couple hundred pages, and the demise of the old generation, which dominated the narrative in the first two books, I found it difficult to embrace characters that hadn’t already been firmly in place in my subconscious. That brings up another important point: the speed with which the narrative flows in this volume compared to the slow unwinding of the story in the first two volumes. I’m sure Mahfouz meant this to be a reflection of the changes Egypt was also undergoing, but the sacrifice was a brief introduction to characters you don’t really get to know very well. Kamal seems to be a part of an older generation and his plodding ways, in both romance and his journal articles, separate him completely from the precocious, lively child we were introduced to in Palace Walk.

Taken as a whole, the trilogy provided an appealing look at Egyptian family life, surrounded by the political atmosphere in Egypt during the early to mid-twentieth century but it seems that the story told, really wasn’t complete and probably could have used a longer narrative to address the imprisonment of Ahmad and his brother Abd al-Munim, as well as the ongoing hostilities occurring in Egypt in the late 1940s. Still, an amazing accomplishment and highly recommended.

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