Sugar Street: The Cairo Trilogy, Volume 3

Nahgib Mahfouz

Maybe I read it all too fast and got spoiled by all the excellent character development and believable dialogue, but Sugar Street, the third volume of the Cairo Trilogy was a bit of a disappointment. Perhaps Mahfouz was just running out of steam, but I was hoping for a better articulation of the personalities of the third generation (two brothers, one a communist and the other a member of the Muslim Brotherhood) of the family at the center of the novels. Still, I think this trilogy is well worth checking out, even if it loses a little steam at the end. I can’t imagine a better way to get a sense of Cairo between the wars than from reading these books.

Recommended.