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Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz

Kat's a bit of a Mahfouz fan, and I was out of books I wanted to read before leaving last Monday morning. I needed something light enough to read in shifts. Metro, airport, airplane, hotel, airport, airplane. I knew the books at the head of my personal queue were not adequate to this requirement, so I thrashed among the bookshelves for something to read.

"Here's a book that's not too thick, has the pulpy pages of an interruptible read, and won't start a conversation with a stranger."

A kind of Immovable Fast, the book follows the decline of various individuals on a very poor alley in Cairo, generally concerned with the indirect denouncement of avarice or covetousness. Man wants to live like the british occupying Egypt during WWII, Man wants to marry the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood, Most beautiful girl in the neighborhood wants a rich husband who can support her in the style to which she feels she is entitled to become accustomed, Marriage maker endeavors to take pecuniary advantage of old widow seeking a young husband, Cafe owner seeks dalliance with young men in front of his wife and children, Cripple maker wants to slake his lust on the bakeress, upon whom he spies through a hole in the back of their shop.

From the descriptions on the back cover of the book, this is one of the earlier novels from the first serious egyptian novelist. It's naive, and naively written, but in the same way some Orwell can be, a failing easily dismissed for an enjoyable story.

What struck me was the immense cultural disparity that handicapped me in understanding aspects of the book. Mentioned above,'Cripple maker,' may have caught your eye. Wtf?

The cripple maker is the guy to whom beggars will go to increase their earning potential. The blind, the lame, the footless, the armless, the mutilated, the grotesque can pull more alms than the merely indigent. After all, there are no cries of,"Get a job," heard by the ears of a blind beggar.

But how common are cripple makers in WWII Cairo? I know they exist in India in the present, and therefore it's quite likely they existed in war-torn third-world Egypt, but is it a likely character in a neighborhood? Does his presence in the neighborhood have a significance beyond the macabre?

Another character mentions that her hair, the most beautiful and lustrous in the alley, smells of turpentine. She does not wash it often; in fact, at one point in the book she has gone over two months without washing it to preserve her hair.

Does the oil in hair stink of turpentine after two months of not washing, or is turpentine something that is added to women's hair in Egypt, perhaps to keep it shiny and relatively free of insect infestation? Was turpentine a common thing to have around, perhaps as a cure-all for sheep afflictions?

Despite the fact that I didn't understand the fullness of many references such as these, I liked not understanding. It gave me something to think about instead of just reading. I don't get much of that from books anymore, mainly because they're all written from my perspective, the whitish americanish middle-class post-modern technoplutocracy.

This is not a deep book, and it is not executed flawlessly, but if you need the light reading of a handful of short stories woven together, you could do much worse.