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Those readers in the Western world who have enjoyed the process of being introduced through Naguib Mahfouz's great family saga to the life and culture of Egyptian society between the two world wars will need little incentive to follow the tale to its conclusion in the final volume of the Cairo Trilogy under review here. Al-Sukkariyyah, the third novel in the series, originally published in 1957 and now tranlsated as Sugar Street, rounds off the narrative in a manner common to all realistic sagas such as this, neatly tying up most of the loose ends. The family patriarch, Ahmad 'Abd al-Gawwad, dies one night during an air raid. Secular universities have now opened, and men and women attend the same classes. The patriarch's grandsons have both become involved in the politics of opposition in Egypt as it endeavors to cope with the short-term issues of war and foreign occupation and the more long-term matters of political systems and contemporary morality. As this novel and the trilogy end, both grandsons are in prison: one as a communist, the other a member of the Muslim Brethren.
The situation in Egypt before the 1952 revolution can hardly have been more effectively symbolized; and yet, in an echo of Henry James's dissatisfaction with such unreal mirrors of "reality," Mahfouz also chooses to leave the political dimension open and unresolved--a decision...