In the Time of Love: A Modern Arabic Novel Review

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In the Time of Love: A Modern Arabic Novel ReviewI've been enchanted by Naguib Mahfouz ever since I read his The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street (Everyman's Library) many years ago. Like few other writers he has been able to take a place I have never visited, in this instance Cairo, and make me feel as if I am living in and walking through its narrow streets and self-contained alleys. Mahfouz, who died 2006, wrote at least fifty books and countless short stories. The American University Press in Cairo has mined a lot of Mahfouz's work recently and "In the Time of Love" is one such new release.
Sitt Ainn is a well-off widow. She is a pearl beyond price who, at age 50 and raising her only child, devotes her time, effort and money doing good deeds in `her' neighborhood. Ezzat is her child and Hamdoun (a boy) and Badriya (a girl) are Ezzat's childhood friends. The story, focusing mainly on Ezzat, takes this three-party relationship and tracks it from elementary school, through adolescence and finally a tumultuous adulthood in Cairo's mid-20th century world of theater.
Any further description of the story would reveal information that is best conveyed directly to the reader. Suffice it to say that, as the title suggests: love or what passes for love in the minds of these characters, and the joy, despair, tension, and betrayal that flows from that flawed emotion is at the heart of "In the Time of Love". Also present is a strong sense of the ongoing dissolution of mind and body so often found in Mahfouz's writing. In Cairo Trilogy it played out over three volumes and multiple generations of an extended family. Here it plays out in one generation in a novella of no great length. The impact on this reader was pretty powerful.
I've been pleased with the various translations of Mahfouz's work and this book is no exception. I speak no Arabic but it seems to me that Mahfouz's prose and his meaning are not lost in translation. I know that I am reading something one-step removed from the original yet I still had the feeling that what I was reading felt and sounded authentic.
If the potential reader is already familiar with Mahfouz they should have no hesitation about picking this up and giving it a go. For a potential reader who has not yet read any Mahfouz I would suggest starting with one of his stories with a bit larger scope: Cairo Trilogy, Cairo Modern or The Harafish would be excellent places to start. I think the minimalist and self-enclosed world of "In the Time of Love" will be better understood with a bit of the context of Mahfouz's larger world-view.
Highly recommended.
L. FleisigIn the Time of Love: A Modern Arabic Novel OverviewLove - who can count its varieties, measure its force, uncover the masks it wears, or predict how it binds and divides? In this spare novel, master storyteller Naguib Mahfouz gives us some of his most memorable characters, widely familiar to Egyptians from the film version of the book: Sitt Ain, with her large house, her garden, her cats, and her familiar umbrella, strong and active, mother of the neighborhood; her son Izzat, so different from her, emotional and unsure of his way; and the friends of his childhood, Sayyida, Hamdoun, and Badriya, all their lives entangled and shaped over many years by the encounter of commitment, ambition, treachery, and above all love. This is a story in and of twentieth-century Egypt, which can be read on more than one level. The neighborhood and the motifs may be familiar, but they combine to tell a new and intriguing tale, with an unexpected outcome.

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