It tells of the ups and downs of an Egyptian family of almost Tolstoyan proportions, through the dominating sensibility of Kamal, the youngest of the Abd al-Jawad children - an undoubted portrait of the artist. 'Palace of Desire' opens just a few years later, in the early 1920's. Mahfouz's novel 'Palace of Desire' takes after the eponymous street, not only in its sinuous turns but as desire, in various guises - romance, patriotism, infatuation and adultery - shapes its wonderfully interlocking plots and echoes through the book.Īs the second novel in his celebrated 'Cairo Trilogy,' 'Palace of Desire' resumes the saga of the Abd al-Jawad family begun in 'Palace Walk.' That first volume was dominated by the stern but philandering patriarch, al-Sayyid Ahmad, and his oldest son, Fahmy, and concluded with Fahmy's violent death in a demonstration against the British occupation of Egypt. A man sitting in a shop on the right could reach over and shake hands with his neighbor on the other side.' Mr. 'Narrowness gave the road an unassuming, familiar character, like that of a pet animal. No matter where a person stood, he was always confronted by a curve, behind which an unknown world lay concealed,' Naguib Mahfouz writes. Palace of Desire is a bow-shaped street in one of Cairo's oldest districts: 'Every few meters it turned. PALACE OF DESIREThe Cairo Trilogy II.By Naguib Mahfouz.Translated by William Maynard Hutchins,Lorne M.

Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz