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SUGAR STREET: The Cairo Trilogy III
by Naguib Mahfouz
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Doubleday (1991-12-01)
ISBN: 0385264690
EAN: 9780385264693
Dewy Decimal #: 892.736
Hardcover: 308 pages
Release Date: 1991-12-01
SKU: SA100404
Condition: Used: Good
Comments: Ex Library copy with usual stamps and stickers. Clear, protective mylar covering over dust jacket. Book itself is bound strong, has little wear and text is clean and unmarked.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
The New York Times Book Review called Palace Walk, the first volume of the Cairo Trilogy, "a tale told with great affection, sensitivity, and humor" and described Palace of Desire, the second volume, as "elegant and often explosive." The Nobel Prize winner now offers the climactic third volume, print.
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Customer Reviews
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boring
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-08-31
the story portraits the husband as a god and the wife is his forever subsevient wife. Boring .
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graceful finale
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-05-26
Sugar Street is a graceful finale to the Cairo Trilogy. I think the Kirkus Review above gives away too much of the plot. I'm glad I didn't visit this page until having finished the book!
I strongly recommend reading the first two books before this one. If you skip directly to Sugar Street, you miss out on all the history which gives added meaning to the events in the final volume.
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The sad conclusion of this Egyptian family's saga. Wonderful!
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-06-02
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is the third book of the trilogy by this renowned Egyptian author. Originally written in Arabic in the late 1950s, many of his works have been translated into English. I'm very glad about this because his unique perspective is an important one, especially now, when everybody and his brother had an opinion about what is going on in the Middle East. These books were written way before Muslims were perceived as a threat, and male dominance in families was an unquestioned way of life. We see the politics of the time through the eyes of one family. And so we learn about the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s in Egypt through the eyes of very specific people.
Even though the author has a tendency to be a bit flowery and wordy for my taste, I found it perfectly all right in this book. Specifically, in this and his other books, he gets into the thought processes of the character named Kamal, who he has followed from childhood to adulthood. In the first book he is a child looking at the world with wide-eyed wonder; in the second book we see him in love; and in this last book we meet him as a bachelor schoolteacher observing the world around him. The patriarch of the family, his father, is aging and so are all the other members of the family. There are births, deaths, tragedies and romances all told against the background of a changing world.
Reading this series of books somehow seemed to make me part of this family. I felt their joys and sorrows on a person-to-person level. It didn't matter that the world they lived in was different from mine. They came alive for me and I found myself thinking about them as I went about my day. Now that the series is finished, I will miss them.
This last book is perhaps the saddest. I would have liked the story to be happier. But this is the story the author told. I cannot change that. However, I do know that the time I spent reading this book left me richer.
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Would Do Business Again
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-03-20
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Shipped earlier than promised and in good shape. Great experience.
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Not as good as parts one and two
Rating  (3)
Date: 2006-01-30
3 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Easily the most political and the least engaging of the three novels that make up the Cairo Trilogy, Sugar Street is a must-read only because you've read the first two installments and feel the need to finish what you've started. The focus of Sugar Street is more on the younger generation of characters -- the children of Yasin and Khadija and others. So the characters that you grew attached to in the first two novels, like the authoritarian family patriarch, take more of a supporting role in this one. That's disappointing. I felt like these new, younger characters were just thrust into the spotlight, and I was supposed to care about them automatically. And of course, it just doesn't work that way. I also felt like the political situation in Egypt received too much attention in this book, and that took away from character development and interpersonal relationships. All in all, Sugar Street was the least interesting of the three. I was glad when I finished it.
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