Into this painfully slow scenario bursts the figure of the younger son, Rushdi, returning from a period working in the southern city of Asyut. The two brothers, who dearly love each other, could hardly be more different. Rushdi is young, handsome, dashing, and reckless, devoted to a nightlife of carousing, drinking, sex, and gambling. Having spotted the beautiful Nawal, he chases her, walks her to school, and wins her heart. However, just as a genuine love is blooming (and gradually being acknowledged and even accepted by both families), Rushdi becomes ill. Tragedy has struck the Akif family once again. It is tuberculosis, and Rushdi needs to go to the sanitorium. In spite of Ahmad’s pleas and eventual anger, Rushdi refuses to acknowledge the extent of his illness and carries on with his reckless behavior. Eventually he cannot avoid accepting the inevitable and goes to the sanitorium. By this time, however, it is much too late, and Ahmad brings his brother back to Khan al-Khalili where he dies in the arms of his devastated mother.
The family now decides that it must move again. As the novel ends, they have found a new apartment. Ahmad’s mother even intimates that their new landlord has a sister in her fifties who might be a suitable partner for him. Although Ahmad bids a nostalgic farewell to his friends at the Zahra Café, there are a few glimmers of hope for the Akif family as it prepares to move against the backdrop of the allied victory at al-Alamein.
Khan al-Khalili shows clearly that Mahfouz is already the master of novel construction, albeit within a series of modes that, from a twenty-first — century perspective, can be described as “traditional” (and certainly based on European models). The novel opens with detailed descriptions of time and place, as Ahmad travels along an unfamiliar route to his family’s new abode. Khan al-Khalili and its denizens are lovingly described, and Ahmad and his career are placed within this changing framework as the family sets itself to adjust to new surroundings. The first glimpse of Nawal in the stairway leads to a series of chapters in which Ahmad contemplates his career and his future. The return of Rushdi (chapter 16) changes everything, and the center of the novel is concerned about his developing love affair with Nawal and Ahmad’s silent agony as he watches it develop. It is on the day of the Eid al-Adha (chapter 33) that the dreadful news of Rushdi’s illness is first revealed, and the developing tragedy leading to his death and burial follows its inexorable course. At the end of the novel the family’s second move in such a short period is placed once again within the broader framework of Egyptian society as it tries to cope with the consequences of a global conflict on its soil.
Many commentators have remarked about the accuracy of Mahfouz’s description of place in this series of “quarter novels,” but we need also to point to the poetic quality of some of his descriptions, a feature that is to emerge in starker relief in his later novels, especially those of the 1960s. Here, for example is his description of the sky as Rushdi is walking Nawal to her school in Abbasiya:
It was a crisp, damp morning, a little chilly. A gentle breeze was blowing, bringing with it intimations of November, which mourns for the flower blossoms of lovers. The sky was full of bright clouds. Sometimes they were clustered together, but then they would break up and turn into frozen lakes that refracted the early morning rays of the sun from the horizon. The way their fringes sparkled in the sunlight was eye-catching.
Or this depiction from the very last scene in the novel as Ahmad looks out of his window for one last time:
It was the middle of the month of Shaaban, and the moon was gleaming brightly in the clear August sky. All around it stars were twinkling coyly as though to express their regret that the moon had again appeared in its youthful guise, something that they had always known would not last. The moonlight bathed the entire quarter in a shimmering silver glow that banished the lonely darkness of night and imbued street corners and alleyways with a particular magic.
Another feature of novel writing where Mahfouz’s developing technique appears in this novel is that of dialogue. While, in accordance with his views on language (that are certainly not shared by all writers of Arabic fiction), he writes his conversations in the standard written language (fusha), he is still successful in conveying both the context and mood of the occasion involved. This applies particularly to the conversations at the Zahra Café, of course, but it is equally in evidence in an entirely different situation, the love-chatter between Rushdi and Nawal (chapter 27).
Mahfouz’s narrator is, to use one of Bakhtin’s terms again, “monologic.” This more traditional aspect of the narrative craft comes to the fore frequently in Khan al-Khalili when the inner thoughts of characters need to be revealed: the often furious and agonized musings of Ahmad throughout the work, and Nawal’s bemused comparison of the two brothers (chapter 27). The same narrator is also not above providing the reader with some more generalized thoughts and opinions on the evils of gambling (chapter 18), the value of singing and singers (chapter 25) — a favorite topic of Mahfouz — and death (chapter 43). Here, above all, is one feature of narrative technique that Mahfouz was to develop and refine further, particularly in the novels of the 1960s.
It goes without saying that the ways in which Mahfouz makes use of all of these various narrative features have had an impact on, and are reflected in, the process of translating this novel into English. The “more traditional” aspects of Khan al-Khalili—the carefully organized and chronologically linear approach to time and the lovingly detailed descriptions of place (the apartment’s bomb shelter being merely one, more obvious, example) — are characteristic of phases in novelistic development that are, to quote E. M. Forster — a similarly “traditional” critical source — reflections of a narrative strategy that relies on “telling” rather than “showing.” Beyond that, the philosophical and ethical musings of Ahmad in the face of his own failures, his tortured affection toward Nawal, and above all the complex sentiments that result from his own deep and abiding love for his brother, Rushdi, these reflections and emotions are couched in often lengthy and aphoristic passages that clearly reflect an earlier phase in the development of the novel genre in general and of its Arabic context in particular. In noting that I have made no attempt either to eradicate or gloss over these features of Khan al-Khalili in this translation, I would suggest that there is great value in observing Naguib Mahfouz, generally acknowledged as being the foundation-layer of modern Arabic fiction, in the process of honing his fictional craft in this novel. In such a context, two points of comparison might be made: the first is with the justly renowned Trilogy (published in 1956 and 1957) with which the series of “quarter novels” from the mid-1940s and early ’50s may be seen to culminate, and where there is a clearly visible development in the process of balancing the various elements of “showing” and “telling,” including descriptions of time and place, dialogue between characters, and the various modes of reflection; the second point of comparison is with the novels that Mahfouz published in the 1960s—al-Liss wa-l-kilab (The Thief and the Dogs), for example, Tharthara fawq al-Nil (Adrift on the Nile), or Miramar—where descriptions of time and place are much more terse and allusive, and the techniques of dialogue and interior monologue are invoked in order to reveal (“show”) to the reader the innermost feelings of the characters. By the 1970s, the above-mentioned and more traditional features of Khan al-Khalili, characteristic of a much earlier stage in his development as a novelist, have all but disappeared. I might add here that, as the English translator of his al-Karnak (1974; Karnak Café, 2006), I have almost automatically been made abundantly aware of quite how far Naguib Mahfouz traveled in his career as a novelist in quest of new narrative techniques and appropriate levels of discourse and, in that process, quite how much he contributed to the genre’s development throughout the Arabic-speaking world.