Morning and Evening Talk

Translator’s Note

MORNING AND EVENING TALK WAS WRITTEN in Naguib Mahfouz’s last and most experimental phase of writing, at a time when he was particularly concerned with exploring new ways of expressing favorite themes — time, fate, politics, morality, the sources of evil, change — and taking the Arabic novel into new areas, like magical realism, folktale, and, on this occasion, biography. Morning and Evening Talk was also written when Mahfouz was an old man approaching his eightieth birthday and in a reflective mood. He had lived through some of the most exciting events in Egypt’s modern history — the 1919 Revolution and struggle for independence, two world wars, the Free Officers Revolution in 1952, the Suez crisis, the Six-Day War, the October War of 1973 (the Yom Kippur War), the assassination of President Sadat — and it was only natural that in old age he should look back and wonder whether it had all been worth it. But the story of modern Egypt really began in 1798 when Napoleon’s troops landed in Alexandria, so Mahfouz makes this the starting point of Morning and Evening Talk. The story begins at the turn of the nineteenth century — before the Urabi Revolution, Muhammad Ali’s reforms, and the encounter with British and French colonialism transformed the face of Egyptian society and set it on the road to modernity — and ends sometime in the 1980s. As such the book represents an attempt by the author to come to terms with the events of the last two centuries.

Morning and Evening Talk is made up of sixty-seven character sketches from three Egyptian families — those of Yazid al-Misri, Ata al-Murakibi, and Shaykh al-Qalyubi — arranged alphabetically according to the name of the title character. The lexicographical arrangement of the text evokes the great Arab biographical dictionaries of the classical period, which record the lives of rulers, nobles, scholars, poets, and other important figures. However, Mahfouz peoples his novel with everyday Egyptians, reminding us of something the medieval Arab biographers apparently overlooked: that history is the sum total of people’s lives; that the story of a nation is the story of its citizens as much as its leaders and remarkable men. The idea of Morning and Evening Talk is to bring together many individual narratives to tell the larger story of modern Egypt, almost like a jigsaw puzzle that the reader must piece together in order to understand events in their chronological context and logical sequence. The unusual structure of the novel also has another important purpose. The reader of Morning and Evening Talk finds symptoms of social breakdown everywhere in the text: as time goes by the father loses his authority, family ties grow weaker, and the family tree is increasingly dispersed across the city of Cairo and beyond. The narrative fragmentation of Morning and Evening Talk is thus an embodiment of the erosion of traditional Arab society, and the family nucleus in particular.

The novel opens with a tragic event, the death of a child, that in many ways sets the scene for what is to come. Morning and Evening Talk is a tale of endings and cruel twists of fate: children die before their parents; husbands perish, leaving families to struggle on meager means; and characters see their fortunes reversed overnight as their party or patron falls out of favor, or when war and other events over which they have no control appear out of nowhere. Yet the book is not without hope, for the corollary of sudden downfall is swift ascent — the July Revolution may be bad news for Halim, Hamid, and Hasan, but for Abduh, Mahir, and Hakim, it brings promotion and fortune, even if such things tend to be transitory in Mahfouz’s world. Moreover, the eccentric person of Radia, and the friendship and humor that punctuate the narrative, are evidence enough that the indomitable spirit of Egypt lives on in the modern era, unscathed by all the change and upheaval.

Like many of Mahfouz’s novels, Morning and Evening Talk is also a search. It is a journey through the homes, cafés, offices, and other haunts of the everyday Egyptian, watching and listening carefully in order to assess whether Egypt is better off now than it was back in 1798. It would be disingenuous to suggest there is a simple answer to such a question, and Mahfouz is certainly too wise to imply one. Instead he paints a vivid picture of Egypt over several generations and leaves readers to make up their own minds.

I would like to thank Feras Hamza, Philip Stewart, and Sabry Hafez for their invaluable help.

Christina Phillips