The Final Hour [Hardcover]

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale."
As You Like It. Act ii. Sc. 7

Written in 1982, "The Final Hour" is the latest book by Naguib Mahfouz to be published by the American University of Cairo Press. It is `classic' Mahfouz in the sense that it takes one family and tells the family's story over two or three generations. It is also `classic' because, as with much of Mahfouz's work you witness the internal dynamic of a Cairene family in the context of a tumultuous and changing world outside the family's house or alley.

The story starts off in the 1930s. Hamid and Saniya Burhan escape from the confines of inner Cairo and build a house in Helwan, then a quiet, leafy suburb. The house quickly becomes Saniya's castle and her whole life is encapsulated by a family photograph taken at a time from "from hour to hour we ripe and ripe". Over the course of the story we see children born and marriages end. As the family grows we see how time and events take this family from ripe to ripe to, if not rot and rot, to trouble and strife. Despite the cloistered walls of this house the tumultuous course of 20th-century Egypt: the fall of the monarchy, strikes and rebellions, the Wafd Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, Suez, the rise of Nasser and a series of wars with Israel all take their toll on the family.

As noted in translator Roger Allen's Afterword there is some surface similarity between the story line of the Final Hour and the The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street (Everyman's Library) in its multi-generational look at a family in Cairo. Although Allen takes pains to point out the differences I do think the comparison highlights some the modest difficulty I had with the book. In Cairo Trilogy Mahfouz takes three volumes to tell his family saga. Here, he covers three generations and fifty years of Egyptian history in a little bit more than 150 pages. The number of people involved in a multi-generational story and the speed with which they were introduced did cause me to have a bit of trouble keeping track of who everyone was. Specifically, I'd have to backtrack to refresh my memory. This was not a big problem but it did interrupt the flow of my reading sometimes.

Allen's Afterword also includes a very useful glossary of names and events. Mahfouz was writing for an Egyptian audience, not an American one, and having a handy reference to explain Mahfouz's references was extremely helpful.

In summary, I very much enjoyed The Final Hour. As I noted in my review of In the Time of Love: A Modern Arabic Novel Mahfouz's writing take me to a place I have never visited and makes me feel as if I am living in and walking through Cairo. The Final Hour is no exception. It is a very good story.
L. Fleisig

If you'd asked me if it was possible to write a family saga covering three generations in the space of 150 pages, I'd have laughed in your face. Then along came Naguib Mahfouz and did it, and I am pleased and satisfied with the work he has turned in. The book covers about thirty years in the life of an Egyptian family, from the late 1930's into the 1960's, as the family in question is buffeted by the changes in Egypt and the Arab world. Family members are jailed and maimed; friends and lovers are killed; they suffer personal defeats and crises of confidence that make personal happiness all but impossible. Inflation makes day to day living extremely difficult, and rigid beliefs make accommodating to the times almost impossible.

There are a lot of characters in this book, but with their distinctive outlooks and ways of talking it's quite easy to keep them all in mind, and I didn't find myself getting confused about who was who, as sometimes happens with family sagas. The writing style in this book is smooth and easy to read. I kept finding myself worrying about what misfortune was next going to befall this family, as they themselves worry about such things. My one complaint is that the book ends abruptly; I could have read another hundred fifty pages about these people without blinking. It helps that these characters are largely sympathetic, where the ones in Mahfhouz's Cairo Trilogy are mostly despicable and loathsome to spend time with. Overall I really enjoyed this book, more than most of Mahfouz's books, and on that basis I can recommend it without reservation to you.