The character and the nation

I just finished reading that brick of a book, the Cairo trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz. It is not right to call it one book, since it is a trilogy published together for the first time. One thousand three hundred and thirty one pages, it took me months to read it. It was difficult at times, boring maybe, too tedious, the writing was sometimes too old-fashioned. When it finished though, I was sad. I wanted to read more, I wanted it not to end. I managed to like some of the characters, even at the beginning I didn’t think I would.

The story evolves around the three generations of a family in Egypt, starting while the English are occupying the country and ending around the second world war. The characters are plenty and very different from each other: initially we are introduced to the tyrannical patriarch Abd-Al Jawaad and his extremely submissive wife Amina. Their five children: the shallow and hedonistic Yasin, the romantic idealist Fahmy and the young Kamal, who will be the main character in the other two books and their sisters: the blonde and naive Aisha and the ugly and feisty Kadja. The most interesting thing in this book is the duality of the life of Abd Al-Jawaad who is extremely serious and scary in his house but also has a secret life full of alcohol and women, the nights that he goes out. Years go by and his children grow up, and Kamal takes central stage. He is a true intellectual, who is looking for the bast way to lead a good life. He initially experiments with religion that doesn't satisfy him too much, mostly because it leaves no room for lust and love. In search of some balance between the intellectual and the physical, Kamal focuses on philosophy, and becomes a teacher and a regular contributor to a popular journal. But his shyness and his reluctance to live cripple him and regardless of his intellectual capacities, he remains a hermit, a man without a life, alone forever. In the last book, the central theme of the entire trilogy, that of the balance between the intellectual and the physical, is transferred to the two nephews of Kamal, one being a religious fundamentalist and the other one being a communist, both of which end up in jail.

These books that span so many years and encompass of so many characters can often be great. They almost always are seen as covert histories if the countries they are set in. In the case of the Cairo trilogy, the struggle within the central character Kamal, might be seen as personifying the struggle of Egypt, from English occupation to independence and from independence to political instability again during the years of the second world war. Perhaps this is the only way to write history these days, though literature, where nations could be seen as complex characters inside a magical book.