Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
If you have been reading my work here, you would know that I approach fiction with a certain hesitation. Not suspicion, exactly, but selectiveness. I tend to arrive late, after others have already mapped the terrain. This time, the entry point was incidental, almost accidental.
I first encountered the name Naguib Mahfouz in Salman Rushdie’s Knife. Rushdie mentions him as a fellow victim of fanaticism. Mahfouz, too, was stabbed by an extremist. The parallel is grim, but it is also revealing. Literature, it seems, has a way of surviving assaults even when writers do not fully escape them.
Mahfouz, of course, is not a marginal figure. He was the first Arabic writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1988. Yet The Quarter does not arrive with the confidence of a canonical work. It arrives almost belatedly.
As Elif Shafak notes in her elegant foreword, the eighteen short stories that make up this collection were discovered in 2018 by an Egyptian journalist, nearly twelve years after Mahfouz’s death. Roger Allen, a longtime and trusted translator of Mahfouz’s work translated the text from Arabic into English. The book came out in 2019.
Since this was my first sustained encounter with Mahfouz, I had to orient myself. I learned that Cairo, his hometown, is more than a setting in his work. It is a recurring structure, a moral geography.
Some of his early novels reach back into ancient Egypt, but The Quarter remains firmly planted in modern Cairo, in a single neighborhood that functions almost like a closed system.
The stories revolve around this one quarter and its inhabitants. Power, hierarchy, justice, honesty, religion and gender inequality surface repeatedly.
The neighborhood is a laboratory of sorts; it’s a place where you get a ringside look at orthodox Egyptian culture. Hovering all over is the figure of the Head of the Quarter, a common thread that ties together disparate lives, disputes, and superstitions.
What struck me most was Mahfouz’s attention to texture. He leaves little unexplored. The rhythms of daily life, the quiet authority of superstition, the small dramas that escalate into moral reckonings and the occasional touch of magical realism, all combine to give the quarter a peculiar density.
That said, while reading, I often felt as if these stories were not quite finished. They read like sketches or perhaps first versions that never reached their final revision. Some narratives are compelling and linger long after they end. Others build patiently only to fizzle out just when you expects resolution.
It is a mixed collection, uneven but never careless.
I have not read much Arabic literature and perhaps that is part of why this book stayed with me. The Quarter does not demand admiration. It invites curiosity. And for a writer who arrived in my reading life through a footnote of violence, that feels like an appropriate beginning.
I will return to Mahfouz.
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