Arabic Short Stories, 1945-1965 (Modern Arabic Writing) Review

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Arabic Short Stories, 1945-1965 (Modern Arabic Writing) ReviewThis book was published in Cairo in 1968. It contained 33 short stories by 30 writers, of whom 24 were Egyptian. The stories dated from the mid-1940s to mid-1960s, which according to the introduction was the time when the short story was the dominant genre in Arabic literature. Two-thirds of the stories came from the 1960s, and only one was identified as published in the 1940s.
The major Egyptian writers included al-Hakim, Mahmoud Taymour, Hakki, Mahfouz, Idris, Suhayr al-Qalamawi, Quddous, and el-Kharrat. Writers from elsewhere included Zakaria Tamer and Ghada el-Samman from Syria, Ghalib Halassa from Jordan and Samira Azzam from Palestine.
Most of the stories were grounded in realism and concerned social problems such as poverty and overpopulation, love of the countryside and problems within it, more personal issues such as the relations between husband and wife and parent and child, or problems in both spheres, such as conflicts between tradition and modernity. Several of the works dealt, for example, with the subject of honor killings.
Other stories, which were experimental in style and focused on the "predicament of the individual," isolation and so on, were of less interest. One blended grotesque fantasy and reality in a manner the author claimed was inspired by Czech cartoon films.
I enjoyed this collection for providing some stories from the 1940s and 1950s, a time for which I haven't seen many other anthologies of Arabic short stories in translation. And for works from the 1960s from some of the major Egyptian writers.
Memorable stories included "The Brass Four-Poster," by Hakki, which showed the changes over the years in the lives of a mother and daughter, and the relations between them, by means of a bed bought for the daughter's marriage. "Hanzal and the Policeman," by Mahfouz, in which a jobless drug addict was astounded at receiving understanding and help from the police, instead of their usual behavior. And "Peace with Honour," by Idris, which showed what happened to a beautiful, trusting girl and the people around her when she was accused of improper behavior with a man. This story especially was full of compassion and irony, as in a tale by Chekhov.
In one of the more interesting stories by one of the older writers, in which the Devil's wish to repent was refused by Heaven and worldly religious authorities because virtue had no meaning without sin, it was a mild surprise to find a few slighting, gratuitous references to a certain non-Arabic people.Arabic Short Stories, 1945-1965 (Modern Arabic Writing) OverviewA collection of stories by some writers already known in translation to Western reader--Tewfik el Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef Idris--and others less well known outside the Arab world, this book offers a sampling of a literary form which showed a particularly interesting and vigorous development during the two decades after the Second World War.

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