Naguib Mahfouz: Miramar

Annie Gagiano

The novel Miramar is set in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, on the northern (Mediterranean) shore of our continent; its author is one of Africa's handful of winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, the revered (now elderly) Naguib Mahfouz, best known for his so-called Cairo Trilogy: three dense, hefty novels that, in a complex portrayal, intertwine family saga, social history and political analysis. Whereas all three novels of the "Cairo Trilogy" centre on a specific section of that sprawling city, Miramar (like all the many texts of Mahfouz's extensive oeuvre, written in Arabic) uses the device of depicting the intertwining (or, at least, mutually impinging) lives of a group of people all living in a small residential hotel, or pension, the Miramar, on the Alexandria seafront. Of the five chapters, the first and final ones are written from the perspective of the most honourable and unselfish of the participants in the small drama that unfolds in this text, whereas the three middle chapters are told by using three of the young male "paying guests" as narrators.

While Miramar is undoubtedly a slighter work than the more famous novels mentioned above, it can be described as a depiction of, as well as a meditation on, social transition: it explores the opportunities and (mostly) the woes of a society undergoing a political transition and experiencing the attendant economic adjustments required of its inhabitants, mirroring at the same time the emotional and moral demands made of them during this process. The design and plot are to some extent old-fashioned, for instance, in the author's employment of the device of the retelling of the main events of the plot from the various narrators' perspectives, and in the clear evidence that Miramar's inhabitants are meant to represent an Egyptian microcosm - ranging from the Greek owner of the Miramar (Mariana), to the most honourable inhabitant, Amer Wagdi (an octogenarian, formerly a highly influential and esteemed political journalist), the other old man, Tolba Bey Marzuq (formerly a top politician in a lucrative ministry and linked to a hugely wealthy land-owning family, but now disgraced, bankrupt and under suspicion), the three young men (also representing a social spectrum) who are the two old men's fellow lodgers, and the beautiful young peasant girl Zohra, maid-of-all-work in the Miramar, who has fled her rural village to escape the marriage (to an old man, for a greedily desired dowry) into which her feudal-minded grandfather had attempted to force her.

What we see in this novel of what glamour there is left of the famous Alexandria seafront - playground of the wealthy - is of the most decayed and seedy kind, but it is counterbalanced by the strength and sweetness of Zohra, the tough, proud and enterprising housemaid who made her own way from the hardships of her life in the country to the hazards of urban employment among a houseful of (mostly) not overly scrupulous males. The three elderly members of the Miramar population evidently indicate alternative aspects of Egypt's and Alexandria's past. Mariana, who is Greek, links with the formerly considerable group of her compatriots who, of course, founded the city itself. A famous beauty and socialite in her heyday, she is (through her first marriage, to an English captain, the love of her life) also linked with the other formerly powerful - even dominant - foreign presence in Egypt: the British, initially colonial rulers and subsequently "custodians" of the country for nearly four decades.

Amer Wagdi, now in his eighties, but without any family to fall back on, decides to return to his birthplace (Alexandria) and to make the Miramar his final home because of a former friendship with Mariana. Himself (in his younger days) as promiscuous as Mariana had been when younger, the elderly Amer Wagdi's political principles are nevertheless very different from hers: he continues to revere the great leader of the earlier Egyptian resistance (to British rule, especially), his master, or "Pasha" - even though the later moral and political deterioration of the Wafdist party had left him disillusioned. Still recognised by his contemporaries (and honoured in particular by the most intellectual of the three younger lodgers at the Miramar), Amer Wagdi the fiercely independent-minded writer resists the disappointments of his rather lonely old age by seeking serenity in the Koran and by befriending and advising Zohra.

There is a great deal of temperamental antipathy between him and Tolba Bey Marzuq, who is as obese as Amer Wagdi is spare and as unprincipled as Amer Wagdi is upright. Formerly a flamboyant, powerful figure indulging all his sensualist inclinations, Tolba Bey had had his land and wealth confiscated in the Nasser-led revolution of 1952 and now attempts to avoid official attention by lodging in the relatively low-profile Hotel Miramar, resentful of the new dispensation but cunningly dissimulating his resistance to the presently powerful and their political choices. He and Mariana had been lovers in former times, but when they attempt to rekindle the sexual flame on a drunken New Year's morning, it is a pathetic, senile failure - their time is over.

Mahfouz depicts the three young men who lodge at the Miramar with a mixture of cynical disdain and humane empathy. Of the two older men, Tolba Bey had been a corrupt and spoiled politician, and Amer Wagdi a leading reformist thinker and writer, but neither was a petty personage, whereas there is something small (-minded) about the three young men-on-the-make who live with them in the Miramar. The most straightforward personality among them is Hosni Allam. A younger son of a now diminished, formerly very wealthy family of country gentry, he has enough money to keep himself in relative comfort, but only the vaguest of ambitions and the most moderate of decent instincts. He is shamefaced about his lack of education, but drowns his uncertainties in alcohol and (mostly) a great deal of bought sex, often tearing around Alexandria aimlessly in his car (the possession of which is a rare luxury for a young man of his age and time in Egypt). He has an opportunistic "loyalty" to the Revolution - mostly caused by his blue-eyed cousin's disdainful rejection of his ambitious, unloving marriage proposal. In the Miramar, his instincts align him to the old man of his own class (Tolba Bey) and inform his natural antipathy to Amer Wagdi. Though not devoid of kindness, occasional gallantry and generosity, he is mostly a lost drifter, an insecure snob and sexual predator, who ends up leaving the Miramar to finance a type of dancehall and place of entertainment with a semi-prostitute as his partner.

Mansour Bahi is the most complex of the three young men even though he, too, is ultimately a shallow and callous person. At university he had been a devoted Communist: a politically dangerous alignment from which he is forcibly and humiliatingly "rescued" by his older brother, a high-ranking police officer. Mansour Bahi works in broadcasting, where he does still try to do progressive work, though he was deeply hurt when his former Party friends unjustly suspected him of betraying them. Yet he makes the surmised betrayal real at a different level when he seduces the wife of his former Communist mentor - the leader of the now jailed group of his former Party associates and friends. Initially he simply goes to her assistance, but his pathological lack of decent feeling manifests itself when he rejects this woman as soon as they hear that her husband will set her free to marry him (Mansour). Something is deeply awry in this young man's psyche. In a move that is a strange combination of guilt transference, scapegoating and suicidal self-destruction, he makes an unprovoked yet murderous attack on his fellow lodger Sarhan el-Beheiry, later giving himself up to the police investigating this death - a half-deranged, ruined man. Although he had meant to, he had not actually killed Sarhan - as it transpires later.

Sarhan el-Beheiry initially seems by far the most assured and politically as well as socially well-adjusted man of the three younger lodgers. A worker's representative to the workers, but with a comfortable managerial position as the deputy head accountant in a textile firm, he lives with (and to some extent on) a semi-professional hooker and dancer, whom he abandons when he develops an intense desire for the lovely Zohra, moving into the Miramar in order to pursue her. She won't go to bed with him unless he marries her, whereas his ambitions require his making a socially advantageous match (precluded by Zohra's peasant status). But Zohra is deeply in love with him. Although he believes that he returns such feelings, he soon contracts an engagement (behind Zohra's back) to the teacher whom she (Zohra) pays to teach her to read and write - in order to be "worthier" of marriage to Sarhan! In the end, Zohra discovers the betrayal and ends their relationship, but she reveals Sarhan's duplicity to her teacher, so that he is rejected there, too. There is an additional entanglement in Sarhan's affairs, though. He is deeply involved in a criminal plan to steal goods from the firm for which he works and sell it. This plot, too, backfires when the crime and its planners are exposed. Sarhan drinks himself into a near stupor, takes a razor blade, slits his wrist and walks off into the night. When he falls down in a deserted spot, his fellow lodger Mansour Bahi (who had been stalking him in a strange, vengeful fury) rushes at him and kicks the unconscious Sarhan so badly that he believes himself to be the dead man's murderer.

In the midst of these rather sordid and (melo-) dramatic developments, Zohra remains the one sign of moral health and hope for the future. She is harmed by, and dejected as a result of, Sarhan's betrayal and shocked by his death, yet still determined to move on, and forward, by the end of the novel. Her truest friend is the aged Amer Wagdi. He cannot prevent Mariana from firing Zohra (Mariana adopts a self-righteous, fastidious attitude towards the young woman), but assures Zohra that he will be her protector or advisor whenever she needs him. His lengthy quotation from the Koran, the beautiful Sura of the Beneficient, concludes the novel and serves also as the expression of the old man's final benediction - to wish Zohra well in her new life, and to console her.

The Beneficient
Hath made known the Koran.
He hath created man.
He hath taught him utterance.
The sun and moon are made punctual.
The stars and the trees adore.
And the sky He hath uplifted; and He hath set the measure,
That ye exceed not the measure,
But observe the measure strictly, nor fall short thereof.
And the earth hath He appointed for His creatures.
Wherein are fruit and sheathed palm trees,
Husked grain and scented herb.
Which is it, of the favours of your Lord, that ye deny?

(quoted Mahfouz 131)

In conclusion, the novel's graceful design and deft characterisation of its wide range of characters can be mentioned. The British novelist John Fowles has provided a brief, useful introduction to the Heinemann English translation published in 1978 (the Arabic original appeared in 1967). The novel is also equipped with copious, sometimes (if I may so put it) excessively informative notes by two editors: Magad el Komos and John Rodenbeck, who also revised the translation.

As a novel about the decadence, difficulties and social complexity of city life in a modernising society, this sophisticated text is a further reminder of the huge range of conditions reflected in the works of authors contributing to the African library.



LitNet: 01 November 2005

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