Ahmad went out every single night and often did not return until dawn, but no matter what the time, Amina awaited him and served him. In twenty-five years of married life, Amina stepped outdoors only to visit her mother on rare occasions, and even then was closely chaperoned by her husband. With a servant and a private bath, she had no need to go out of the house, and Ahmad simply forbade her to show her veil in public.

It is one thing to know in the abstract that women were secluded and compelled to accept their husband's behavior, come what may it is quite another to learn specifically about Ahmad's wife Amina. The other is the astonishing position of women. It is one thing to know in the abstract that women were secluded and com-pelled to accept their hus-band's behavior, come what may it is quite another to learn specifically about Ahmad's wife Amina. While deeply hypocritical, Ahmad does not feel so, and Western readers will undoubtedly find his unapologetic outlook one of the two most alien features of Egyptian life seven decades back. With them he is witty and charmingly dissolute - the favorite lover of many chanteuses and ever the life of the party. Ahmad's other personality comes out with customers, friends, and mistresses. Not only does he enjoy total jurisdiction over the family, but he routinely demands acts of servility of them: the children must kiss his hands when he is angry with them his wife, Amina, sits by his feet each night when he returns home from his carousing to take off his shoes and socks. At home, he dominates his family through authoritarian rule and absolutist morality. The implications are momentous and the tale is enthralling - at least until it weakens under the weight of its own symbolism two-thirds of the way through.Īhmad, the father, is a prosperous 45-year-old merchant who lives a remarkable double existence. In Palace Walk (the name refers to a major street in the old part of Cairo), Mahfouz details the process of modernization in Egypt from the ground up through the story of a single Cairene family, the Abd al-Jawads, in the course of a single year, 1919. Palace Walk is the greatest novel of Naguib Mahfouz, the Noble Prize winner for literature in 1988 and it and the two other parts that round out the Cairo Trilogy may well be the masterpiece of Arabic literature in the twentieth century.

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz