While the novel focuses on a willful young woman whose ambition to escape the confines of the alley leads her into prostitution, a pageant of other vivid characters, from the caf owner who likes boys to the man who creates maimed beggars and from the young man with the faithful heart to the rake and the pimp, fleshes out the picture of a society in crisis and transition. The introduction in this edition to 'Miramar' was written by John Fowles, author of 'The French Lieutenant's Woman.' I found it helpful.This much-loved Mahfouz masterpiece is a rich account of life in a back street in a poor quarter of medieval Cairo. It does have some traces of humanity around the edges. Like the other two novels in this set, 'Miramar' is quite grim. Zohra never speaks for herself, but everything centers around her. After his chapter is finished, the action backs up to the beginning and is retold from the perspective of another tenant, and then by two more lodgers after that before Wagdi returns to wrap up the story. The first chapter is told by Amir Wagdi, a retired journalist who takes a fatherly interest in Zohra.

Each of the men takes an interest, with varying motivations, in an attractive young woman named Zohra who has been hired as the pension's maid. We are in a pension - in my culture, it'd probably be called a boarding house - run by a past-her-prime woman with all single male tenants. 'Miramar,' set in Alexandria, was my favorite of the three, and it's told in an interesting way. It's an intriguing but depressing morality tale, or perhaps an immorality tale. The thief in the story is a narcissist only his own concerns are important to him.

'The Thief and the Dogs' is told from the perspective of a career criminal who is released from prison and quickly returns to his career. It has several key characters, none of which seemed terribly interesting. I see it's considered by some to be Mahfouz's best novel, but it was my least favorite of the three. 'Midaq Alley' is the one of the three that is centered in a Cairo coffee house. It's hard, gritty and occasionally violent. There are no Pyramids here, no Sphinx, no scenic Nile River vistas. So I found this collection of short novels by Mahfouz in my neighborhood bookstore and slowly worked my way through it.Ī subtitle that might apply to all three novels would be 'Egyptians Behaving Badly.' These are probably not novels the Egyptian Visitors Bureau is going to encourage you to read. I'm fascinated by urban cultures, even if I probably wouldn't do very well in them, and I like coffee houses, even though I drink tea. Horwitz wrote of coffee house society in Cairo and said he had learned what to expect from Naguib Mahfouz's fiction. I became aware of him while reading a nonfiction book by Tony Horwitz, part of which was set in Cairo. The late Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the 1988 Nobel Prize for literature in 1988.

Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz