The Quarter

Clever, audacious and pacily written, The Quarter is a posthumous collection of short stories by Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006). His narrative of the lives of Cairo is vivid and judicious, replete with his usual insights into human character, and will appeal beyond his usual readership as a testament to the human spirit. The title The Quarter (‘harah’ in Arabic) will remind astute readers of the author’s most famous pieces of writing, after the Cairo Trilogy, namely Malhamat al-harafish (The Harafish, in English) and Awlad Haratina (literally ‘Children of Our Alley’ but published as Children of Gebelawi). The title indicates the confidence of a conscious genius prepared to intrigue, stimulate and stir the dullest of minds. In many respects the tales of this book echo the stories of these earlier novels, and reflect Mahfouz’s obsession with the entropy of inner city urban life. Respectively, the short stories from The Quarter serve as illustrative narratives that represent the ambiguity of Egyptian society (and thus, indirectly, the cultures and faiths they claim to belong to). Durable but understated, socio-religious constraints contrast abruptly with the less inhibited behaviour of the characters of the novel and from the florid details of these competing juxtapositions emerge the primary conundrum – the discourse is replete with persons ignoring or enforcing normative social values yet evoking grand historical lessons and meanings.