By Mursi Saad El-Din What characterised David Trasilian book is his application of western canons of criticism to literary works in Arabic. I find his chapter "The Novel and the New Poetry' an example of this. In dealing with the novel he chooses two writers from Egypt, Naguib Mahfouz and Youssef Idris and from other Arab countries Tayib Salih from the Sudan and the Saudi national Abdel-Rahman Munif. After giving the biography of Mahfouz Trasilian goes into a detailed analysis of his novels. He is of the opinion - and I agree with him that Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy "is perhaps his single most important achievement." One reason for this, in his opinion, is first its size, running over 1200 pages, and covering historical events from the nationalist movement against the British in the 1920's to events following the Second World War." Beyond this achievement lies Mahfouz's ability to produce an Arabic novel "that unites the European form of the realist novel with local Egyptian content." In fact the Trilogy is some kind of a prolongated history lesson exploring "the public, and perhaps even more importantly, the private lives of his characters." The result is that some of these characters, like Ahmad Abdel Gawad (si essayed) in the Trilogy, have become an example of the hypochrilzed husband who stays night after night on various jaunts. At the same time his wife Amina and children are subjected to his dictatorial rule. Going through the Trilogy we get to know about the anti- British demonstrations, in the words of one of his characters "There's never been demonstrations like this before. A hundred thousand people, wearing modern fezzes and traditional turbans - students, workers, civil servants, Muslim and Christian religious leaders, the judges." This is Egypt. Another novel that created a great deal of argument was "Children of the Alley" which was serialised in Al-Ahram newspaper in 1959 and which had a religious character, which in turn takes a turn from the realism of Mahfouz's Trilogy to allegory. The novel was purported to deal with Judaeo-Christian and Muslim religious tradition. Hence the censoring of the noel in Egypt and its publishing in Beirut. The author then moves on to Youssef Idris whom he describes as "Mahfouz's greatest rival in the 1950's and 1960's. After giving the biography of Idris, he goes on to explain the characteristics of his works. Idris is known for his short stories, plays and articles in both Al-Goumhoriya and Al-Ahram. Idris was a committed writer, with leftist tendencies and was a believer that literature should assist," in the process of social change and in the struggle to bring in a more just social order." Idris's first collection of short stories "The Cheapest Nights" appeared in 1954, followed by "All on a Summer's Night" and "The Dregs of the city. Trasilian believes that some of Idris's stories are among the best written in Arabic. Trasilian comes to the conclusion that Idris's writings "in their frustrations as well as their impatience for change are typical of a strand of Arabic literature in the 1950's and 1960's that insisted on literature having a clear social message and its authors a clear commitment to change. The author believes that this was in keeping with the international main stream, exemplified in works like Osbourne's Look Back in Anger. The Sudanese Tayib Salih is known for his novel "Season of Migration to the North, which was in the 1970's the only Arabic novel to appear in Penguin's classics series. Trasilian quotes a critic who has suggested that Salih's novels maybe seen on "episodes in a continuous narrative.. that gives full expression to the state of dissolution experienced through the Arab societies as a result of European influence, something in the manner of what the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe achieved in "Things Fall Apart." The estrangement to European influence has to do "with a wider crisis of "Arab ideology polarized between a vain attempt to mimic the West... with various fundamental thinkers concerned to re- establish what they see as certain basic values after a period of foreign domination."
