Naguib Mahfouz review

Financial Times reviews Naguib Mahfouz’s final novel, Morning and Evening Talk:

In Morning and Evening Talk, his last novel, he sets the bar high, refusing all the classical unities. Instead of rooting his story in one place, he flits between Cairo and the countryside. Instead of following a chronology, he races back and forth along a 200-year timeline. And instead of one story, he offers us 67. Each takes the form of an informal obituary – a life as it might be described by a wise neighbour. Together they describe the fortunes of three families joined by friendship, feuds and marriage. But the pieces of the jigsaw never make a picture. They swim in and out of each other’s lives so fast and so often that any mental map we might have half-constructed soon dissolves. The only organising principle is the Arabic alphabet. Each chapter carries the name of a character and they appear in alphabetical order.

I think this may be the first review of the book, which was published last October in the US.