Mahfouz, Naguib " The Beginning and the End"

Mahfouz, Naguib "The Beginning and the End" (Arabic: داية ونهاية/Bidaya wa Nihaya) - 1949

I have read several books by this great author. And when the Read the Year Challenge came up for 1949, I saw that he had published a novel in that year. So, the decision was easy.

We meet a family in Cairo. The story takes place in the late 1930s. They have four children, an adult son, an adult daughter and two school-age boys. The father suddenly dies and leaves the family in abject poverty. The eldest son was never destined to become a successful supporter of the family, so the second one steps in. However, everyone in the family faces issues with their sudden situation and nobody really manages to get out of it, except for the second one who seems to be on the best way. The others, however, face a lot of problems. There is no happy end for them.

This book is still a masterpiece.

Book Description:

"Set in Cairo during World War II, this novel is a masterpiece of human compassion reflecting with sympathy and well-balanced pathos the material, moral, and spiritual problems of an Egyptian family.

Suddenly confronted with poverty when the father, its sole support, dies unexpectedly, the family's middle-class respectability and conformity can only be supported on the backs of a brother and a sister who sacrifice their own reputations by immersing themselves in the seamy underworld of Cairo.

This is a powerful portrayal of a middle-class Egyptian family confronted by material, moral, and spiritual problems during World War II."

Naguib Mahfouz "who, through works rich in nuance - now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous - has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.

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