Palace of Desire

...There is an irony to Bishop Laroche's glowing tribute and indeed to the very fact that an outspoken Catholic priest has been elected president of Haiti...

...Altogether Mahfouz has a magnificent command of the customs and manners that add up to a culture and a people's desires...

...A man with an infinite capacity for compartmentalizing and rationalizing, he bullies his way through life using custom, bits of the Koran, and his personal magnetism to keep things in order...

...he calls this phenomenon the principle of conservation and mutation of social energy...

...This book, to be sure, has little to do with the techniques of the literary modernists...

...Just as Aristide LIFE ALONG THE HILE PAI.A~ OF DESIRE Naguib Mahfouz Doubleday, $22.95,422 pp...

...The young man--an "ox" to his adroit father has damaged the family reputation by divorcing in a messy way and threatening family connections and dignity...

...In our present period of vaguely focused curiosity and thinly veiled distrust of the Islamic mind and self, Mahfouz satirizes and analyzes without reducing the humanity of his characters...

...efforts to arrest and prosecute human rights abusers and corrupt officials...

...The younger children and their mother Amina, a woman sequestered from the world and yearning to please the master of the house, fill out the family picture...

...Each volume of this ongoing series has three sections: a short biography and an overview of the scholar's theology in relation to the texts...

...In addition, Haiti's justice system, tax laws, minimum wage laws, and land tenure system all need critical examination and new legislation...

...Mahfouz makes him the most obvious victim of passion, a comic loser who moves from scandal to scandal...

...It seems perfecfly applicable to current events in Haiti...

...PAUL TILLICH Theologian of the Boundaries Edited by Mark Kline Taylor $9-95 paper REINHOLD NIEBUHR Theologian of Public Life Edited by Larry Rasmussen $9.95 paper RUDOLF BULTMANN Interpreting Faith for the Modern Era Edited by Roger Johnson $9.95 paper FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER Pioneer of Modern Theology Edited by Keith Clements $9.95 paper DIETRICH BONHOEFFER Witness to Jesus Christ Edited by John de Gruchy $9.95 paper KARL BARTH Theologian of Freedom Edited by Clifford Green $9.95 paper ADOLF VON HARNACK Liberal Theology at Its Height Edited Rumscheidt by H. Martin $9.95 paper ,o ~, V'--~'~"~ ~ 14 June 1991:411...

...However, Aristide and the Haitian people--who together live w i t h i n the c o n s t a n t shadow o f death--would describe the apparent suppression of their movements and the subsequent renewal of energy in terms of the Paschal Mystery...

...Mahfouz, known for his admiration of Proust, offers interior monologues of Kamal's unrequited love and self loathing that read like heavy-handed imitations of Charles Swann's agonies...

...While Palace Walk is principally set in the old neighborhood of narrow streets, coffee houses, stands of snack and drink vendors, and lattice-work balconies protecting women from the public sphere, Palace of Desire opens out and becomes a social study that encompasses the drawing rooms of merchant princes, the boulevards of the new part of town, and the challenges to Ahmad's small world of comfortable compromise...

...When the novel examines states of consciousness, metaphysics, and the history of ideas, it is sententious...

...Three factors will affect any reforms the new government tries to implement: the constant threat posed by ton-ton macoutes and the Duvalierist remnant, especially to Aristide himself...

...Alda's brother is an image of decadence, a brilliant emblem of those whose values are Ottoman and detached from Egyptian national identity...

...In creating his discrete Cairo scenes---the elegant or noisy or sordid quarters of the city, the conversations during Amina's coffee hour, or the patrician banter at Alda's parents' gazebo---Mahfouz employs the classic, orderly articulation of the storyteller who knows his people inside out...

...410: Commonweal Meanwhile Kamal's sisters have done the socially correct thing by marrying the elite Shawkat brothers, two lazy ciphers...

...They are copious reports emerged from the ashes of St...

...A splendid scene toward the end--with Ahmad recovering from a stroke and receiving visits from his pals and neighbors, the crude and ascetic--shows Mahfouz's gift: "They almost seemed like slivers of his heart...

...For once, Haiti has leaders Haitians can trust...

...Mahfouz raises the in-law joke to an art form as he stages battles over who knew the recipe for Circassian chicken first and who is most deferential to an old lady...

...Yet while the reader is on familiar Balzacian ground, it should be added that the ground is sometimes rather flat and predictable...

...When the third volume appears next year in English, Mahfouz's chronicle will have reached World War II, the conflicts of liberated grandchildren, and the issue of communism in Egypt...

...from the Arabic world given humane depth and artistic harmony by a tolerant, witty, urbane observer of small scenes and large patterns...

...While the father's coarse pleasures take on a pathetic aspect as he chases a young singer and keeps her on a houseboat on the Nile, Kamal pursues cosmopolitan Alda, a Proustian heartbreaker who comes from the upper middle class and represents the unattainable...

...It's the wit, irony, and rich sense of incongruity in life that make Palace of Desire an important novel of civilization...

...DAWN DE VRIES, San Francisco Theological Seminmry "Historians and philosophers will be grateful to the editors for the care they have taken to acquaint their readers with the 'philosophical spine' of each theologian's speculative thought and with the cultural and historical milieu in which it was carried OUt...

...a new agreement with the Dominican Republic covering Haitian sugar cane workers...

...Mahfouz himself goes to his favorite cafe regularly to talk politics and listen to gossip...

...The exiled politician Sa'd Zaghlul, a dynamic nationalist, is made into a powerful symbol of thwarted ambition, a counterpoint to the frustration in private lives...

...In the Parish of the Poor aptly illustrates Hirschman's analogy...

...Albert O. Hirschman, the development economist, has recently used an analogy to describe the plight of local development efforts...

...The ideas as advanced by Kamal --about Darwin, nihilism, self-determinat i o n - a r e curiously dated...

...In response to such formidable tasks, Aristide has surrounded himself with strong and capable cabinet members, all of whom are light years ahead of Haiti's recent political figures...

...Aisha is a slender, pliable girl who tolerates the domination of the wizened widow Shawkat...

...There are no ellipses or experiments, just the familiar interior musings of characters who seem to think in bursts of emotion or rhetorical flights...

...and a bibliography...

...You move through the pages, relishing the diversity and hardly realizing that you're contending with a bulky monster of a narrative...

...Mahfouz is better on collisions than on musings...

...His treatment of the fat-thin issue is worthy of a French strucmralist (one with a good prose style like Claude Levi-Strauss...

...Hirschman says that although a project or movement may die out, this "social energy" becomes active again but in a different form...

...It is as clear and shrewd as the accounts of people's lives given by an inspired and trustworthy raconteur in a cafe...

...The struggles of the Haitian Conference of Religious, the old Radio soleil, Mission Alpha, various Caritas projects, the Papaye Peasant Movement, Tet Ansamn groups, and the 1i Legliz all came alive within the network that put Aristide in the presidency...

...Once again, death has been overcome by resurrection...

...her plump sister Khadija--an assertive, caustic, insightful young woman --wants to be an autonomous self, a woman with her own kitchen within her mother-in-law's household...

...As the chronicle resumes in this volume---a self-contained, entirely clear story by itself--we are reminded of the aspirations of son Fahmy, a young law student killed in a nationalist protest in Palace Walk...

...One rarely e x p e c t s to b e inspired or even enlightened by a n t h o l o g i e s , but under t h e able guidance o f t h e g e n e r a l editor, John de Gruchy, t h e s e volumes soar above others o f t h e i r k i n d . . . The s e r i e s as a whole should be very u s e f u l in c o l l e g e and seminary classrooms...

...The second installment situates the rogue-patriarch against the background of deteriorating traditions, filial insubordination, and the rising tide of nationalism and resentment of British domination...

...Aristide's election was the result of a "renewal of energy" of many suppressed or aborted efforts...

...David Castronovo his grand-scale novel of Cairo life in the 1920s-weighing in with the heft and detail of a nineteenthcentury chronicle--is the second part of Nobel laureate Mahfouz's family trilogy about the middle classes between the wars...

...The first volume of the trilogy, Palace Walk, focuses on Ahmad al-Sayyid, a prosperous retail merchant whose tyrannical domestic regime, decorous business life, and late-night pleasures with cronies and lute girls provide the narrative with its tensions...

...The title, Palace of Desire, refers to the alley where Yasin, Ahmad's grown son by his first marriage, has his household and conducts his updated, ironically presented version of the well-lived life, in his case a clumsy parody of the father's more discreet philandering...

...it's a complicated debate about power, femininity and masculinity, the outward signs of inner worth and substance, the traditional order and progress...

...and finally, the need to coax (and use efficiently) support and assistance from the United States and other donor nations...

...Mahfouz has performed a great service to world literature by offering such a complexly ambivalent view of people...

...Mahfouz only brings philosophical issues to life if they are worldly or political...

...the need to garner some support from the business and upper classes...

...Jean's, his campaign movement emerged from the apparent failure of numerous church movements...

...The books were first published in 1956-57, but are still news to most of us...

...THE MAKING OF MDDERN THEDLDGY SERIES This major series introduces a new generation of readers to the writings of some of the most formative and influential theologians of the last two centuries...

...His ardor and idealism are passed on to his brother Kamal, a philosophy student whose desires distill the modem humanist program of political liberation, scientific progress, sustaining love, and beauty in the arts...

...GERALD A. McCOOL, S.J., Fordham University Current volumes in the series include...

...This book's coloration and variety are achieved with grace and ease...

...substantial edited selections from the theologian's writings, with short introductions that locate the origin and significance of the piece...