From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

Palace of Desire

Naguib Mahfouz,

William Maynard Hutchins (Translator)

Start date: November 1, 2025

Discussion: Classics Corner

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Classics Corner

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By Lynn · 3 posts · 40 views

last updated Jun 25, 2025 08:25PM

Palace of Desire — discussion with ✴spoilers✴
By spoko · 2 posts · 5 views

last updated 18 hours, 30 min ago

What Members Thought

Jun 05, 2011 Laura rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-2011, nobel-prize, 3ms, family-saga, hf-egypt, egypt

This is the second book of the Cairo Trilogy.

The story now is at 1920s continuing the family saga of Al-Sayyid Ahmad and his two sons, Yasin and Kamal.

However as a reader, I couldn't get the point of the narrative of this book which reading become boring in some way. By the end of the book, the question remains unanswered: so what Mahfouz?

Lets see what happens in the final book of this trilogy. ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Oct 23, 2025 spoko rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, book-club, africa

This book feels drastically different from its predecessor, both in tone and in content. Palace Walk balanced its drama among the whole family, giving you a sense of a living, breathing household interacting with (and reflecting) a world in transition. Palace of Desire retreats into a smaller, dimmer space. The focus is almost entirely on the family’s (surviving) men—their lusts, self-delusions, and indulgences—which narrows the world down to something far less engaging. What had felt like a This book feels drastically different from its predecessor, both in tone and in content. Palace Walk balanced its drama among the whole family, giving you a sense of a living, breathing household interacting with (and reflecting) a world in transition. Palace of Desire retreats into a smaller, dimmer space. The focus is almost entirely on the family’s (surviving) men—their lusts, self-delusions, and indulgences—which narrows the world down to something far less engaging. What had felt like a broad social and moral canvas now feels confined and, frankly, tedious.

I had enjoyed the symbolic subtext of the previous book as well, and I suppose there’s still some of that here, if you’re inclined to dig for it. The characters’ actions and conversations do seem to echo larger cultural trends—a shift toward Western moral frameworks, growing secularism, the rise of feminism, etc.—but that subtext is so buried under obsessive descriptions of female anatomy of women and masculine indulgence, I really just couldn’t be bothered.

Kamal’s obsessive infatuation with Aida is a prime example. I’ve heard him described as the main character of this novel, and I suppose he is. But his fixation doesn’t illuminate anything about him, and doesn’t even provide him with an arc (in spite of the structure of an arc in the events that transpire between them). Honestly, it just drains him of personality, to the point that even his explicit moral and intellectual struggles are overshadowed by his adolescent fascinations.

Al-Sayyid Ahmad and Yasin are no better. Their contradictions have lost their sharpness; they no longer feel like a commentary on social roles so much as the pathetic meanderings of men past their primes. What I kept wondering was: Where are the women? We never get to spend any time with Amina, who was such an anchor for the first book. Neither do Khadija or Aisha actually matter to this book, and it’s certainly less rich for their absence.

Where Palace Walk captured a family—and a society—in motion, Palace of Desire feels like that same family stalled, circling endlessly around its appetites and regrets. Whatever insight Mahfouz intended to reveal through that repetition gets dulled by the sheer tedious weight of it. ...more

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