Yes, more heat, more travel, more travel and more heat.  Rather than answering all your kind and so much appreciated responses to my previous blog, here is a very quick update.  I travelled some more, after Manchester (the one with the pool), there was London, then back to Norfolk, then a train to Hartelepool (you don’t want to go there) another workshop and now at long last back home. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the patio this evening, my plants all flowering, a nice meal plus a couple of glasses of wine, and now I’m trying to get my head around all the things I’m supposed to be doing tomorrow:

Write a decent blog (forget it – I have no time.  I will do some serious writing next week)

Pack my suitcase: after all we are going on holiday first thing Saturday morning..

Write up all the notes of the workshops and share them with colleagues, clients, etc…

Chair two telephone conferences, make sure I know what I’m talking about…

Try and remember all the things I want to take on my holiday: books, walking gear, what clothes to take?  I bet it’s going to be pouring with rain now that for the first time in fifteen years we have decided to stay in England and despite all the excitements about heat waves this last week – I somehow suspect we only had a heatwave because I had to do all that travelling for work, let’s be honest!

Books: I started reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead but, and I hate to admit it, I cannot get into it, I find it too removed, too dull almost.  Is that because I am just too frantic and cannot concentrate properly?   I agree, the writing as such is perfect, clever, it is almost poetic if all you want is words and how words are strung together – however, the story just does not appeal.  Not now.  Can anyone out there help me, and tell me why I should (because I think I should: after all, she won the Pullitzer Prize) feel involved in the story, what it is that I am missing?  I have of course bought three of her novels, all ready to go in my case for reading whilst on holiday and I feel disappointed with this first read, Gilead. 

What I really want to do this holiday, in Cornwall if you must know, is to pick up my fifty-one stories.  Perhaps Robinson’s approach, the writing of a letter to my granddaughter…  There’s a thought!

My 3G or my server (not sure which one to blame) definitely does not like being used for blogs, especially not cooperating in publishing new posts.  As I seem to be spending an awful lot of time on the road these last few weeks I feel frustrated and then simply give up trying!  3G and server are conspiring against my patience.

So here I am in Manchester or rather a hotel somewhere east of Manchester, on a Sunday night, to be ready on time for  a workshop tomorrow morning.  It’s stifling and hot – when I left the house this afternoon great big  blops of rain hit the car windscreen but then stopped again as I moved away, into Lincolnshire, to catch a train from Peterborough.  It’s a different world in the weekend: while during the week tired travellers are synonymous with workers, people with laptops, mobile phones, people  in suits and travelling as loners or in teams, talking about work, meetings and sales, the weekend is all about families, weekend bags, knee length shorts, casual clothes, couples, tired kids and yes, all the seats are taken again, the compartments are  full and every seat is taken.  Despite cancelled trains and wondering why I’m doing all this, I got here eventually and was quite pleased that this is a kind of spa / gym hotel and the swimming pool was still open when I got here.  So here I am now, having expended all my energy, tense travel-tiredness, the fan blowing, and thinking about my blog.  I had intended to make some clever comments on summer reading and all that, unfortunately the day has taken it all out of me and I shall leave you with this.. what… not sure.  Just to say that, yes, in my mind I have written pieces about

Books I’m reading… many

Books I’ve bought to take with me on holiday….  many

Wimbledon – I hope Federer wins….

Iran and what’s happening there … constantly in my mind, thinking how much this is now a different generation going through all this…

My granddaughter and my looking forward to her visit…. in August

My other family, close and extended

Our holidays… starting Saturday, but before that I still have to do x number of workshops, telephone interviews, attend meetings, draft a report, and…. etc.

Will I be able to get myself in the right frame of mind to write something different from reports? 

Well, you get the gist.  I’m with you and will let you know soon about some books you should definitely read… At least that’s the intention.

Incest appears to be on writers’ minds, although I’m aware of course that it’s been on the mind of many great writers for centuries.  Jeffrey Eugenides in Middlesex writes about it; although the plot is about the hermaphrodite Callie, she or rather he, is a consequence of incest, or so he wants us to believe.  The most intriguing and fascinating part of the book is all about the love between brother and sister, orphaned, in a tiny village in the mountans of Greece.  As I said before, a great book – and yes, I did finish it completely.  Still, I think it’s two different stories and I enjoyed the greek tragedy most, the illicit love between Desdemona and Lefty (Eleutherios) Stephanides, Callie’s grandparents, who get married as they escape the Turkish massacre of the Greeks in Smyrna, on a ship heading for New York.  The incest story is most casually narrated, and seems almost natural in the scheme of things.

Other books I have recently picked up to read seem to dwell on the incest story and make it the centre of plots that unravel vile murders and secrecy.  There’s Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a racy and entertaining detective story which is about trying to find out why a girl became lost, thought to have been murdered.

Without giving away the plot of the story, Hakan Nesser’s The Mind’s Eye also unravels a plot that entails incest and illicit relationships.  It’s a racy detective story.  I don’t usually indulge much in detective stories, but this one is great entertainment whilst travelling endlessly on trains, in need of some light relief from heavy going meetings, dragging overnight cases and laptops across busy railway platforms and when trying to sleep in yet another hotel bed.  A very good read and I think I might get some more by Nesser – I’m hooked as they say.  It’s like reading a good television drama.

Leaving home at the beginning of this fortnight I left the garden and our great plans for a ‘proper patio’ instead of the rather unsightly greenhouse that stood desolate and packed with empty pots, tables that were never used, garden tools and messy forgotten growing bags, in the hands of a builder with our instructions to build us that long desired patio.  So it looked a bit like this half way in the week.

Our greenhouse now has found a new home with the neighbours, who will re-erect it somewhere behind their garage:

Our patio is beginning to look promising half way through the second week:

And today, after having oiled some of the garden furniture, a very satisfactory experience whereby old dry teak glows gratefully after its treatment, and after a visit to the local garden centre, we have this long desired patio.   Here I can read my papers and books on a sunny summer afternoon, or sip a glass of wine at the end of a long day.  All it needs now is some sunny weather – not much chance today although the most threatening skies seem to have disappeared and there are lighter looking cloud formations with patches of blue in between.

I am reading.  Yes I am.  I’m halfway through Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.  And it’s like reading two different books.  One is about Desdemona and Lefty  escaping the Turkish massacre, their marriage at sea and their settlement in America.  Their hideous secret, the cause ultimately of Callie’s dilemma, or rather, her / his life.  The other is about Callie, the hermaphrodite, granddaughter  or is it grandson (?) of Desdemona and Lefty and daughter (or son) of Milton, their son, and Tessie, his cousin cum wife.  I think you probably get the drift of this.  It is an amazing book, really.  The story is mind boggling but believable and the writing is erudite and gripping. 

However, it’ s taking me a long time.  It’s not one of those books that you pick up one evening and finish the next weekend, give or take two train journeys.  And yes, I have been on train journeys, and car journeys, again.  Did I worry only recently about work and perhaps not having enough to do?  Well, all that’s changed.  I’ve been to Bradford, to London, to Nottingham and yes, Wales again.  I’m writing, but the wrong kind: reports.  Still it demands all my intellectual energy and so I am just not getting round to writing reviews, book reviews, or much of my own 51 stories.   Otherwise, I do a lot of writing!

Another thing I don’t do much of at the moment is looking at all your blogs, let alone reading them, what you are coming up with as far as your reading and writing is concerned.  But I will.  Promise. 

And then of course, spring is really here now.  There’s work to be done in the garden.  It’s juggling time: work, reading, writing, gardening…  Who could want for more?

A few weeks ago, Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, 10 May 2009,  interviewed Richard Overy, a historian, whose new book  The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars has just been published.  This book ‘is the first book-length exposition of his antimaterialist view that ideas and culture make history, and that no grand historical narrative can be understood without them’. 

As usual, Appleyard’s interviews are thoughtful essays on current ideas and dilemmas, related to culture, progress (or not), history, science, etc.  and Overy’s book appears to provide plenty of food for thought.  I always enjoy reading Appleyard’s reviews, or interviews, on serious non-fiction books, because they show there are still so many of these books being written,  non-fiction books.  Only last Saturday (16 May), the Guardian wondered about the decline of the ’serious’ book, the quality non-fiction book, asking whether booksellers are more interested in clever price promotions than clever books.  There are different views on this, with some arguing that the demand is there, still.  Andy Beckett in the Guardian notes that ‘the crisis in serious non-fiction has probably been overdone.  There is a crisis in the British bookselling, thanks to the internet, the recession and the particular competititveness of the British high street…. .. Some non-fiction genres, such as literary biography, are in decline, at least for now.  But other serious genres, such as economics and nature writing, are on the rise….’ 

I have recently bought a number of non-fiction books, one of which is Cultural Amnesia by Clive James.  It has the subtitle ‘Notes in the margin of my time’ and is a collection of essays on  authors and great minds, artists and scientists, ranging through the alphabet from Anna Akhmatova and Louis Armstrong to Aleksandr Zinoviev and Stefan Zweig.  Too much to read in one week, even one month or probably a year.  It’s a book to dip into and ponder.  After all, it took James 40 years to write, building up from notes on books and articles he read, music he enjoyed, etc.   Such books are  for keeps, on the bookshelf, to be picked up when the mood takes you.   

Another non-fiction book that I started reading is The Storm by Vince Cable which I hope will explain to me exactly what the credit crunch is really all about…  I am told that if anyone can make sense out of it and help you understand some of what is going on in the banks, then it is Vince Cable. 

Neither of these are books that you carry around with you though, they don’t easily slide into your handbag or briefcase, and they require too much clear and focused attention for being good bed time reading, when all you want to do is happily sail away with some thoughts on the fiction book you’re reading.  I need a really long long holiday to read these books…

Do you enjoy reading non-fiction?  

And then the Swedish writers: They’re up and coming, Swedish writers, translated into English.  In the same Culture Section of the Sunday Times on 10th May,  Joan Smith discussed Hakan Nesser’s new book ‘Woman with Birthmark and noted that despite the reputation of Swedes and in particular the rather sceptical view about translated fiction in the UK, Nesser laughs a lot as he has plenty to be amused about;  the sucess of a number of Swedish authoris is ’staggering’.  On the back of this review of Swedish writers I bought Stieg Larsson’s The Girl wih the Dragon Tattoo, the first in a trilogy.  Apparently Larsson is now the most widely read novelist in Europe.  Definitely good for the holiday pile!  In due course, I will let you know.   As a bit of gosspipy aside, the Sunday Times on 17 May notes that the family of Larson are now fighting over his fortune: he died of a heart attack, leaving his partner for 30 years (they were not married) without a penny because he had not made a will and his father and brother are running away with the money, leaving her to ponder the the title of his last book (to be published).  A suggestion, a commentator noted, might be ‘The Widow who Dreamed of Taking Revenge’?

And as far as the here and now is concerned: I’m reading Zoe Heller’s The Believers and am enjoying it very much.  Perhaps I’m climbing out of the depth of that ’spring tiredness’ that I suffered from so badly these last few weeks, even if the weather is still apallingly miserable.  This is a book I’d like to recommend:

I haven’t stopped reading, I have stopped blogging for a bit, that’s all.  A kind of spring tiredness, my mother used to call it.  That exhausted feeling, as if somehow you will never get there.  Where?  I don’t know, I just know I won’t get there.  Usually the feeling goes again, after it becomes clear that it really will be spring and then summer, that it really will warm up, some time.  Not yet.

The ghastly revelations about MPs expenses, the greed of bankers, the sense that everything is definitely sliding down a slippery slope into an undergrowth that becomes murkier and murkier, none of it helps to cheer you up.  Sinking back in a cinema, watching Angels and Demons, the film version of Dan Brown’s book, seemed suitably relaxing because did not require much thought: Hanks and the girl were doing all the running around Rome, from one church to another, just too late to save three out of the four cardinals from being brually murdered by a so-called member of a so-called secret society, but, bless, rescuing the last one just in time to be elected the pope when all’s well that ends well, yes, this was a very suitable entertainment on a chilly late Saturday afternoon in Norfolk.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve picked up books, skipped through some, read others, written a story, thought a lot about writing but incapable of ever picking up that pen or openening that blank page on my laptop, no I didn’t.  Let’s stick with the books and after all the excitement about Bookers and Costas and what have you, it is as if everyone is sitting back for a bit.  I’ve looked at my bookshelf, there are still plenty I have not read, but not many have appealed, even though I must have bought them for a reason, thinking that I MUST read them, that they would be exciting, new, different, a real discovery. 

Not quite so.

One that I did enjoy, and I think I mentioned it about a month ago now, yes, that’s how long ago  it was when I read it,  was Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 - it was only at the end that I thought the denouement was perhaps just slightly off course, did not work somehow, but then so what, I’d had a most enjoyable journey through Russia, through Stalin’s Russia.  Perhaps enjoyable is the wrong word to use, it was gripping, a thriller with a child killer on the loose in a country where crime, supposedly, did not exist, not at that time, and so there was no murderer to catch.  Definitely worth reading.  The state was much more dangerous.

Then, did I mention the White Tiger by Aravind Adiga in one of my previous blogs?  I think I did, it’s still lying on my desk somehow as if I’m expected to write a review.  But I’m not in the mood to write reviews, so I’ll just say that this was a reasonably enjoyable read, it did win the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and so it probably has had its due share of reviews all over the place. 

I picked up Hilary Mantel’s A change of climate, partly intrigued by the setting of the book, which is part Africa and part Norfolk.  It is one of her earlier novels, first published in 1994, but it is highly intelligent and well written, full of ideas and both serious and funny, with people that are realistic and believable.  I liked being taken along some of the Norfolk villages, the deadly isolation of some of them, the staidness of its inhabitants, living from one year to the next without expecting the world around them to change, ever.  The desolation of being stuck, as a teenager, or even a grown up for that matter, without transport, in one of those coastal places, in the middle of the winter, is palpable, which at the same time is Norfolk as a setting of peace and quiet where teenage drug users, substance abusers and those in dire straits, can be taken in by a family of carers who have had the most appalling experience in an Africa torn apart by apartheid.  Well worth reading – I’m not going to give away the story or the plot. 

A book that I bought, because when it came out it was recommended in reviews and has a blurb that says that is is  ‘inspired by the expansive scale and webs of relationships of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels’, is the Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher.  And it was in fact shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize.  It received huge acclaim, yet I found it long and dare I say at times too long.  It is about two families in Sheffield, one that has always lived there and another one that moves in across the street from London; and it’s about how they live, their lives becoming intertwined, in an England set in 1974 and moving through the eighties into the early 90s and on.  It is a great thick tome, you could not carry it around with you on a train journey or stick it in a bag to take with you anywhere, with well over 700 pages in generously large typescript.  But I simply could not read every page, although I wanted to know in a way what happened to each of the characters, the parents, the children, I did not have the patience to read through all the conversations that somehow evoked everything that was happening.  For me, the book could probably have been half the size and it would have given me a much sharper and clearer view of England during the miners’ strike in the eighties, during the Thatcher years.  Perhaps I simply was not that interested in the fairly mundane lives that was led on this Sheffield street.  And then, characters just seem to fade away, into Australia, into hospital, or into another part of Sheffield or London.

Over the last few days I have read Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, after having listened to him talking about it on a podcast, and feeling really intrigued.  Of course, it was there on my tbr pile anyway.

The story of Roseanne McNulty is set in Ireland, in the 20’s and 30s, but also in the here and now.  Looking back, a hundred years old, Roseanne narrates her story, she’s in an institution, and hides her writing under the floor boards of her room, hides them from Dr. Grene, who comes and visits her, almost on a daily basis.  Dr. Grene asks questions, he wants to find out why Roseanne was institutionalised in the first place, and whether there are reasons to ‘let her go’ now that the institution will be demolished and only much smaller and more confined ‘accommodation’ will become available.

Dr Grene himself is also getting older; he’s 65 now and is trying to cope with the death of his wife Bet, and their estrangement over the years prior to her death, with his sense of guilt.  Dr Grene writes down his thoughts about Roseanne and what he is able to find out about her, tries to discover her secrets, but he is constantly sidetracked by his own story and so we get to know Dr Grene also, to a certain extent.

About growing old he writes:

There has never been a person in an old people’s house that hasn’t looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants.  They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join.  But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

The Secret Scripture is a wonderful book, full of insights, and the story is riveting; it’s incredibly moving without ever a hint of sentimentality and you wonder how these things could happen to people, how one catholic priest could wield such an influence and because of that could so thoroughly ruin other people’s lives.  We know that these things happened and Sebastian Barry makes it only too real.  This is great writing, and his book is high up on my list of best books this year, as much for the style and skill with words as for the story it tells so well.

While Roseanne McNulty slowly uncovers her story, looking back on the very tragic course of events that lead to her incarceration in ‘the madhouse’,  Dr Grene carries out his own investigation until he uncovers the shocking secret in Nazareth House in Blexhill in England.

(Gavin has just informed me of his review, here)

 The Sunday Times Culture section today however has an interesting article by Bryan Appleyard on Ishiguro and his latest book, Nocturnes, which will be published shortly.  I like these essays by BA – well worth a read if you have the time.  I will definitely get hold of this book – I like Ishiguro’s writing.

However, my eye got caught by a non-fiction title ‘Voodoo histories: the role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history’ by David Aaronovitch and which is reviewed by Christopher Hart.   Hart writes:

Voodo Histories is, however, much more than a prolonged sneer at human folly, ignoble fun though that always is.  It is also a sensitive inquiry into why conspiracy theories appeal, and Aaronovitch’s theories are consistently reasonable, persuasive and humane.

I think conspiracy theories are fascinating: why do people offer sometimes really complicated theories on and accusations about for example, Diana’s death and Kennedy’s assassination? Lots of us greatly enjoyed the Da Vinci Code, which ultimately is no more than a conspiracy theory and as Hart notes, a pretty juvenile one at that.  I might just try and get hold of a copy of this book – it’s finding the time to read it!

Meanwhile, I’ve started Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (which is now out in paperback) and I will let you know how I get on with this.  First pages are very promising!

Carol Ann Duffy is one of the poets who is able to express the kind of thoughts that are somehow  hidden inside me and that I am unable to vocalise.  She knows my words, understands my world.  It’s gratifying that she has now become the poet laureate.  In the Guardian Review today she writes about this appointment and what it means to her, generously including all others who belong to ‘the honourable tribe of poets’ . 

     I feel a mixture of humility and delight in becoming the new poet laureate.  The humility comes from my awareness of the great talent of my peers, but the dleight comes from accepting this honour as the first woman to do so.

And she notes that this is truly a historic day for women and for poets in Britain, as she is the first woman to hold this position, the first in 341 years, the first since Charles II appointed Joohn Druden as the first poet laureate.

I have her collection Rapture which I  very much want to recommend.  The poems are direct, you can read them without agonising about what they mean, they talk about all aspects of love including passion as well as resentment, and all the other emotions that are part of being human and relating to others.

Congratulations to Duffy, it is really nice that a paper like the Guardian not only devotes part of its Culture section but also the third page of its main news section of the paper to this appointment, bringing poetry to the front on a day and in a week when politics, health, social service and other aspects of life seem to draw our attention to the worst in present day living.  Yes, let’s have some more poetry!

Well yes, I’ve been a bit preoccupied.  With life. Not with books.  Or reading.  Or commenting.  Life, work, waking up and going to bed and trying to fit in everything that needs to be fit in – everything that life is really about.  So yes, I worked, I pulled weeds in the garden, I moaned about how hard everything is and that I cannot fit all the good things into my 24 hours a day, and other things.  But who cares?

So I took a few days off, no telephone, no laptop, no television, no radio, no … nothing.  Just visiting.  They don’t believe in keeping in touch with the world, with the day to day existence that seems to make my life and routine overfull.  None of that.  I’m visiting.  I sleep on the couch – well, it does pull out like a bed.  I watch my granddaughter, nothing else to do.  I read books and stories to her, endlessly.  The telly does not work anyway.  I’m not interested in trying to read a German newspaper.  My book is very unsatisfactory.  You wonder which one?  Well, yes, it was the other one that was nominated for the Booker Prize, that many people hoped would win, but it did not. I’m actually glad it didn’t, because I felt utterly exhausted with the jargon, the seafaring jargon, the words, the effort to ‘evoke’ through a language that I did not understand and simply had no inclination to try and understand.   I wanted the story.  In English.  Or Dutch. or whatever language I can read, but not one that I would have to try and master before I could read the book, the jargon.  Yes, I’m talking about Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.  I felt impatient: there were too many characters and I could not really associate with any of them.  It did not create another world that I could lose myself into.    Not really.  They were creations, artifice.    Not real.  Even if I wanted to know what happened to them,  these characters, for some reason or other.  But perhaps that was a perverse kind of stubborness, born from the fact that I did not really have anything else to read either, before going to sleep.  Apart, perhaps,  from stories for my granddaughter.  So I read loads of stories, and they were lovely, because her eyes went bigger and bigger and you could hear her draw in breath.  So much better than the Sea of Poppies.

And then we went to the zoo.

I felt sorry for the elephants who seemed to be stuck in the backyard of some run down, closed factory site, and turned their backs to each other – fed up with it all.

Better to go and look for something else

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are much more at peace with the world and their environment, even if there is nothing green, they make up for it in their own way, and their own colour:

The giraffes on the other hand have got it all sorted – spring is here, definitely, and someone in that zoo has thought about their environment, their living space:

Yes, it was spring.  And now I’m back in the real world and newspapers, and news on telley and flue pandemics, and budgets that don’t work…. Oh well.

I have already reviewed the first book in this series – and you may remember that I was very much in two minds about it.  On the one hand I was intrigued by the story, by what was happening to the various members of the Al Jawad family.  On the other hand, I felt really annoyed, angry, irritated by the way women were portrayed and the very stifling character of Al-Sayyid Ahmad, the husband and father of this family, in fact by the relationships between the various members of the family.  I utterly disliked him, the husband, but at the same time felt irritated by the women, his wife and daughters, their subservience and their apparent lack of character.  Even the sons were totally under his autocratic rule. 

Having read the second and the third book in the series, I have not really changed my mind although I can see that what Mahfouz is trying to do is paint a realistic picture of what it was like to be either male or female in this family at the time of writing (1920s in the first book and going on to the thirties and forties in the second and third part of the trilogy), in Egypt, to be precise, in Cairo.  However, I can see that what is being evoked in these books is probably a great deal of reality, of how an imaginary family might have lived at that time and within the particular culture.  Nevertheless, the characters, one by one are utterly dislikeable, and that is I think, the root of the problem.  They are weak, with the men getting away with a most appalling disregard for anything female, assuming that as long as they don’t know everything is alright, and the women accepting their roles and even when the daughters marry much easier-going men, they either assume the role of a veritable nag or they are punished somehow with the author killing off their husband and two sons so that there is nothing very much to live for anymore.  Perhaps I’m giving away too much too soon! 

You do want to read these books, believe me, if only to be able to give vent to this irritation whilst at the same time having to acknowledge that the author is able to keep you going, because the style, however old-fashioned and seemingly out of date, nevertheless is just right for this kind of story – it is how you imagine the Arabic language would flow and how people would have expressed themselves at that time and within the culture.  I have little knowledge of the Egyptian novel as such, but I imagine there is an authenticity in this writing and that is probably where the comparison has been made (by others) with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy: the grand panoramic writing, that takes in the minutest detail of day to day living of a time and place that are now alien to us.

In Palace of Desire, the second book of the Trilogy, the utter depression and repression of the first book gives way to a somewhat milder regime by Al-Sayyid Ahmad, even if he carries on whoring and stipulating what his wife and offspring can and cannot do.  The killing of their son, Fahmy, at the end of the first book, by English soldiers, has shifted the autocratic behaviour somewhat; there is a kind of mellowing, as if the shock has been too much.  The children are growing up, and there is Yassin who has married, divorced, then marries again and divorces again, unable to stay at home and always out on the town searching for easy women.  The daughters marry and the mother is given a little bit more freedom: she is allowed to go out to mosques whereas before her place was well and truly in the home only, tidying away her husband’s clothes when he comes back in the middle of the night after his partying with his friends, visiting women, getting drunk.  Yet, during the day he is well-regarded business man, who is strict with his family.

The third book, Sugar Street, focuses to a large extent also on the youngest son, Kamal and his soul searching about women and being a great writer, refusing to marry because of his never forgotten unrequited love.  Amina, his mother is now old, Aisha and her daughter Naima have moved back in with the parents after the death of her husband and two sons, and there is also the slow decline of Al Sayyid Ahmad. 

The books provide a vast and colourful panorama of what life is like for this family, their growing into adulthood and slow decline, the weddings and the funerals, the upheavals and the social and economic changes that are taking place, the international relationships that form a background to the growing away of the younger generation from the older one. 

Writing all this down I do think there is richness in these books that provide the gentle addiction, not being able to let go, even if you are utterly and truly aghast at the way the characters behave and develop.  Or perhaps, in the case of some of the women, just don’t seem to develop at all; they remain ornaments in a predominantly male world.

Mahfouz himself had a very strict Islamic upbringing and he probably painted a very well-known picture of what it was like to live in a family he depicts in the Cairo Trilogy.  He was born in 1911 and died when he was 94, in 2006.  He was a child during the time he depicts in the first book, the 1920s and so was probably already aware of what was going on around him, with the rebellion against the English in Cairo.  He received the Nobel Prize for the Cairo Trilogy and I think it is well worth reading up on his biography.  Here’s a Wikipedia link.  Yes, I know….