I loathed the father and was incredibly frustrated with the mother. I had a difficult time understanding most of the characters. Sometimes, especially when there are the cultural and era differences there are here, I have tremendous interest in a book; here it made it very difficult for me to read it. I’m not sure why as I’ve adored plenty of books with evil or unappealing characters. I did begin to enjoy it a bit more toward the end and I should probably give the next two books in the trilogy a More...

I was frustrated with this book...I was expecting more...
I struggled through the first 150 pages, just trying to become interested in the characters and see where the story was headed. The family was so far outside of my experience that I found them difficult to relate to.

The father was overbearing, cruel, distant, prideful and hypocritical. He saved his best and most pleasant traits for his friends and his family was left with a far-removed disciplinarian. And he never changed. Amina, the moth More...

كنت أعتقد أن الكتاب لن ينتهي
أعترف أنني قرأته في ظرف سيء جدا، و أعترف أيضا أنني مدرك أن الرواية بريئة تماما من صورة سي السيد النمطية، لأنها ببساطة أول من صورها، و أعترف أيضا أن الصورة لم تكن قط وليدة الخيال بقدر ماهي انعكاس وفيّ لواقع عربيّ امتد عقودا في الزمن، لكن مع ذلك لا أستطيع أن أبدي امتعاضا من تلك الشخصية و من ذلك المشهد.. ربما لأنه على تغير الزمان و تغير طبيعة المشهد، فلا يزال الكاتب العربي يصر على الصورة التي ابتدعها نجيب محفوظ منذ سنين عنيدة، فلم تحوّر و لم تغيّر..

أما عن الرواية، ففصله More...

"The Palace Walk" by Naguib Mahfouz is, by far, the best work of fiction that I have read this year and is now one of my top ten favourite novels.

"The Palace Walk" is the first volume of “The Cairo Trilogy.” It centers on the life of an Egyptian Muslim family living through the period between the end of World War I and the beginning of the 1919 revolution against British rule, a time of dramatic change in Egypt.

The novel is an engrossing story of epic proportions. Each character is examined in More...

خلال فترة قراءتي للرواية كان يخطر ببالي سؤال ملح عن التقييم الذي سأمنحه للرواية , ووحتى فترة متقدمة من القراءة كنت مصرا على أنها لا تستحق أكثر من ثلاث نجوم , لكن ومنذ الصفحة 400 وحتى نهاية الرواية حدث ما لم اكن اتوعه , وحصل ما فسر لي سبب كون هذه الرواية السبب الرئيس وراء حصول محفوظ على جائزة نوبل .
هذه الرواية وببساطة سبب إضافي يدعوني إلى زيارة القاهرة, المسرح الذي اختاره محفوظ أو المسرح الذي اختار محفوظ ليكتب عنه روايته
إن كنت تريد قراءة رواية عن الاستبداد فهذه الرواية هي ضالتك
إن كنت تبحث عن ر More...

Beautifully written, but slow and a bit stilted. Definitely a product of its historical context (one of the first, I believe, novels from the Arabic world to be translated into English and popularized in the Western world); I found the characters, particularly the women, a bit flat and... idealized, perhaps? They seemed to be archetypes rather than individuals, but I feel that was part of the point of this book, to write about a family so extreme they were nearly a stereotype, and then to slowly More...

This book comes across as well written even in translation. The prose is easy to read and the level of detail is very high so you can picture what everything looks like perfectly. The book (at least as far as I've gotten) has no plot, it's all about the characterisation and unfortunately the characterisation is the most regrettable thing I've read in a LONG time. Imagine if you will a book written less than a century after slavery ended, written by a white man, where one of the central character More...

This is the first installment of Mahfouz's Cairo trilogy. This first novel serves as an introduction to the Al-Jawad family, centered around its tyrannical patriarch Mr Ahmad. He rules his family with an iron fist, but luckily his family obligations do not stand in the way of his libertine nightlife. As daily life unfolds in Palace Walk, with its retinue of weddings, births, deaths, divorces, so does History in this Cairo of 1919, where the British rule starts to fray at the seams.

I was absolute More...

Mahfouz is the only Arab writer to my knowledge to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. This particular novel is the first of three in his Cairo Trilogy, published in 1956 and translated into English in 1990. I am unsure what I expected when I began reading it. Within the past few months I had completed Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and I suppose I expected something similar. I could not have been more mistaken.

This work takes place in Cairo between 1917 and 1919, from the y More...

The first novel in The Cairo Trilogy is set in a Cairene neighborhood in October 1917, just after the death of Husayn Kamal, the Sultan of Egypt. Kamal was chosen three years earlier as the figurehead of the land that was a part the Ottoman Empire but had been ruled by Great Britain since 1882. The previous leader, Abbas II, was deposed by the British at the onset of World War I, once the Ottoman Empire sided with the Central Powers and against Great Britain. Egypt was declared a British protect More...

At 512 pages, "Palace Walk" is a carefully detailed domestic drama that proceeds at a leisurely pace, exploring the day-to-day life of a WWI-era family and eventually the impact of larger political events as Egypt struggles for independence from British rule. Much of the novel concerns the conflicts between an authoritarian family patriarch, his submissive wife, and his young sons and daughters, whose own struggles for independence mirror the rise of nationalistic spirit that erupts in street de More...

Found this trilogy in Waterstones almost by accident. Naguib Mahfouz was the first ever Arab writer to win a Nobel Prize for literature in 1988. HIs work feels of the now, and yet he was born in 1911 and died in 2006.

I wasn't sure what to expect but there was something about the crit comments, by various newspapers that I respect, that made me want to buy all three and I am so very pleased I did, as they are exceptionally well written.

What you could describe as an ordinary Egyptian Muslim family More...

Sitting in the garden of my friend Jim yesterday with several other readers we were discussing this novel by the Nobel-prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz. Everyone agreed that it was a good read and perhaps even a great book. The reasons center on the characters Mahfouz has created and their relationships--their story. he story is one which takes you back to Cairo, Egypt during the Great War. Palace Walk is set in Cairo, and covers the time between 1917 and the Egyptian revolution of 1919. Most of the More...

This is perhaps my first venture into Arabic literature. I haven't read anything that was written by writers hailing from the Middle East, and so when I figured I should change that, I decided to look first into the works of Nagīb Maḥfūẓ, who was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. And with that in mind, I selected the first book of his Cairo Trilogy, entitled Palace Walk (Arabic: بين القصرين Bayn al-qasrayn).

So what is this about?

This book tells the story of the al-J More...

This was assigned over spring break in my Arab Literature class--one of my first Mid East Studies classes, some four or five years ago... and the two best things I can say about it to sum up how good I think it is are, 1, I went on to read its sequels despite the press of final papers and final exams later on that semester, and 2, acting out a scene of Palace Walk for a class project in the same class was the best memory I have of that semester. In fairness, we got a pretty good scene: (view spoiler)[ when the (hide spoiler)] More...

(Palace Walk is the first volume of the Cairo Trilogy. It was originally published in Arabic in 1956; translated by William M Hutchins and Olive E Kenny, then released in English by Doubleday in 1990)


Naguib Mahfouz is a Nobel prize winner from 1988. He is credited as the first Egyptian to write modern novels. Palace Walk follows a middle class family through two years in the early 1900s. World War I is ending, leaving Egypt under occupation by British forces, their leaders sent into exile and th More...

Al Sayyed Ahmad’s family is Amina his wife, and his four children. Ahmad parties every night with a lover, and his fellow merchants, and beats his children during the day if they oppose his will. This novel depicts the Egyptian family on a collision course with the forces of change that bring about the 1956 independence of Egypt from Great Britain. It is hard to know of Mahfouz was attempting to create a microcosm to reflect the macrocosm of Egyptian society in this 500 page detailed account of More...

Amazingly evocative of a time and place: Cairo after the first world war. But I personally disliked too many of the characters and the plot (if you want to describe it that way) moved too slowly. I started reading in January 2011, but almost gave up and took a long time to pick the book up again. Imagine my surprise six month later when I got deeper in the book and found descriptions of protests against the British occupation that could have been taken from news reports of the Arab Spring of 201 More...

ملحها كمال
وذروتها فهمي
أحببت ذاك الزمن ، أحببته جداً !
ولربماذهبت إلى يوتيوب بحثاً عن أغانيه التي ربما أطلت من بين ثنيات الكتاب أو على لسان الشقي كمال
ثم تأبى إلا أن تعلق بذاكرتي فأرددها في الذهاب والمجيء على مسمع من ماما...ودهشتها !
* أسمع الكاتب يروي ما حدث في مصر في مطلع عام 1919 فكأني به يتحدث عما حصل مؤخراً فيها
حماس شبابي وروح وطنية و مظاهرات لمت الكل وجمعت الشمل وهي _ وإن أختلف العدو بين الآن وحينها _ رواية لذاك الزمن
أو وصف بتفصيل دقيق لأحداث اليوم و لشباب 25 يناير !


لا تخبر أحداً بما تق More...

هي الجزء الأول من ثلاثية القاهرة كما سميت ،، اخترتها لوجودها في المركز الأول في قائمة أفضل مئة رواية عربية في القرن الماضي.
وأيضا أولى قراءاتي للكاتب العظيم نجيب محفوظ . قبل أن أقرأها بحثت لأستزيد عنه فأذهلني ماوجدت ،، بالرغم من معرفتي به منذ الصغر إلا أنني لم أعرف عنه سوى اسمه فقط ،، وحين قرأت شيئا من سيرته فوجئت أن كل كتاباته حولت إما لفيلم سنمائي أو مسلسل مصري.. أكثر من عشرين رواية كلها وبلا استثناء ،، فلا عجب أن يحصد بعد أربعين سنة من الإبداع جائزة نوبل في الأدب.. فما قدمه لم يكن بالشيئ اليس More...

Palace Walk is part of a trilogy of books that follows the fortunes of an Egyptian family as they live their lives in Cairo during the time when Egypt was gaining its independence from England.

Through it I hoped to gain some insight into the segregated world of Muslims and I believe I did- though I am not sure if the author exaggerated conservatively or not.

The family has strongly written, deeply flawed characters- the central one being tyrannical and hypocritical and ultimately, unlikeable. Th More...

I am overwhelmed and the long search and wait that culminated with reading ‘Palace Walk’ was worth an undertaking. I had nurtured high expectations and I found them only soaring. Originally in Arabic I read somewhere that the translation did capture the originality. Putting the battle of translation vs original aside ‘Palace Walk’ has left me dumbfounded. My chief motive was to understand Egypt beyond my limited knowledge of pyramids, mummies, curses and pharaohs. Naguib Mahfouz was the best pos More...

تستحق بين القصرين - مع شقيقتيها بالطبع - أن تكون واجهة محفوظ. إنها محفوظ ذاته، إنا قطع مترامية من الواقع الذي تحس أنه يتنفس حولك. يمكنك أن تنتقل بطرفة عين إلى فترة ما بين الحربين ويتحول وعيك غلى وعي مصري وطني يعيش أجواء ما بعد الحرب العالمية الأولى ويتفاعل مع أحداث وطن بأكمله، وستعتبر نفسك أيضا جزءا من أسرة مصرية ذات خصائص معقدة ومتغيرة مع الزمن والمواقف. الوصف المحفوظي الذي يتنبه لأدق الأحداث التي تستحق أن تكون الصورة من حولك، ويحتفي بلواعج النفس البشرية وتفاعلاتها مع الأحداث. بمقدور محفوظ أن ي More...

I have read the original Arabic of Mahfouz's Trilogy twice. The first time when I was 15 and it shaped my mind and won me for ever to literature. The second time was thirty years later and I discovered much richer layers in the book. Now reading the English translation I was curious to see how Mahfouz feels in English. It is a wonderful translation, accurate and fluent. However, I felt that Mahfouz the stylist, the master of fascinating Arabic is absent and the fact that the book retains its app More...

This is the first novel in a trilogy by the Nobel Prize winner in 1988, and definitely the first Egyptian novel I've ever read. The novel is about a religiously conservative middle class Cairo family during the struggle for independence from England in the early 1920's.

The father is just unbearable, stern and tyrannical with his family, keeps the daughters and wife locked up in the house, his one emotion is anger with his family, and yet he's a playboy with his daily night on the town. The wife More...

I just finished Palace Walk. Reminded me of Gone with the Wind. Which I read before I was 10. I could probably dig up my book report somewhere.

PW is a plodding and conscientious demonstration of point of view and evolution of various emblematic members of an Egyptian family (the patriarch, the long-suffering mother, the daughter whose obedience is ill-rewarded, the wayward daughter who may straddle the colonial divide (she will end up in ruin but her progeny will tell the story), the carnal/uti More...

تؤرخ الرواية تاريخ عائلة عبدالجواد الرجل الصارخ التناقض بين شخصيته دخل المنزل و شخصيته خارج المنزل، فالرجل نفسه الذي يحاسب على اللفتة و الحركة في منزله هو نفس الشخص المشهور بالظرف و حب الحياة و المزاج خارجها، تكرهه في البداية و يصدمك و تحزن لأجل أمينة الزوجة المستسلمة للجميع بنا في ذلك ابنائها، شخصيات الابناء متنوعة و لكنها جميعها راضخة لسلطة الاب

القصة بداية لثلاثية و ترى فيها تحول و نمو الشخصيات من فصل لآخر كما تواكب التطورات السياسة، أسلوب نجيب محفوظ يجعلك لا تشعر بالوقت و يشدك لتعيش مع كل شخص More...