This saga by the Egyptian Nobel laureate and author of the acclaimed Cairo Trilogy tells the story of the tumultuous rise and fall of the al-Nagi family, whose members struggle throughout the generations to recover its honor and live up to its glorious past. Ashur Abdullah, abandoned as an infant by the gates of a monastery in a poverty-stricken alley, is found and raised by the devout Sheik Afra Zaydan and his kind wife, Sakina. As he grows, Ashur's enormous physique belies his gentleness and piety, and he lives a modest life (despite a divorce and remarriage) as a cart driver, until his miraculous evasion of a plague and unyielding charity toward the common people of the alley — the harafish — cause them to rename him Ashur al-Nagi (Ashur the Survivor) and elevate him to clan chief. He enjoys a celebrated reign, but his sudden, mysterious disappearance one day leaves his son, Shams al-Din, to try to recover control of the clan and causes the people to weave legends of his life and supposed return. The book traces the successive generations of his family, whose fortunes vacillate widely throughout the years. Amid episodes of great drama and intrigue that include love affairs, marriages, divorces, betrayals, murders, abandonments, ascensions to power, and falls from grace, we meet such memorable characters as Samaha Sulayman al-Nagi, who flees execution for a murder he did not commit and who in exile, marries an independent woman, Mahasin, only to run from the law again; Zahira, a bewitching servant girl who divorces one man so that she can marry her stepson, and then divorces again to marry Aziz; and the last Ashur al-Nagi, who lives honorably despite his brother Fayiz's corrupt business dealings and suicide. This Ashur becomes the clan chief, at last restoring the family's reputation and realizing his namesake's legacy. Mahfouz's consummate storytelling abilities, marked by operatic events, vibrant characters, and resonant writing, result in another triumphant epic.
Pub Date: April 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-42324-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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