Palace of Desire
The Cairo Trilogy, Volume 2
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
The second volume of the highly acclaimed Cairo Trilogy from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, Palace Of Desire is the unforgettable story of the violent clash between ideals and realities, dreams and desires.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A sanctimonious tyrant of a father discovers that his mistress, whom he keeps on a houseboat, is secretly married to his dissolute, just-divorced son. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mahfouz pulls off a daring plot with gleeful dramatic irony in this, the second volume of his Cairo Trilogy. Al-Sayyid Ahmad, the bullying, pompous, belching, self-adoring patriarch first met in Palace Walk , reduces wife Amina to a tireless domestic beast of burden given to ``angry spells.'' Another son, sensitive idealist Kamal, who idolizes the father he fears, plays out a mad, unrequited, pathetic crush on a haughty aristocratic woman. The narrative simmers with domestic turmoil, feuding in-laws, political talk of Egypt's quest for independence in the 1920s, women in a male-dominated society committing acts of self-assertion. A masterpiece, albeit a wordy, very leisurely one, this family saga is well served by a scintillating translation that exposes English-language readers to an Egyptian Balzac.
