Naguib Mahfouz, The Beginning and the End
The story takes place before World War 2, in Cairo. The death of Kamel Effendi Ali marks the end, for his wife, daughter and three sons, of a period of relative prosperity. It is the beginning of a time of struggle, sacrifices and difficult choices…
To prevent the family from falling apart, Samira, the mother, who always raised her kids with a firm hand, announces the restrictions to come and the necessity that everybody sticks to them. Nefisa, the daughter, will earn money as a dress-maker, to the great shame of her brothers. As for the sons, Hussein and Hassanein, they will pursue their educations, at least until the baccalaureate, after what they will be able to help support their families. While Hussein accepts that he will have to bear the burden of poverty, Hassanein, the proudest one, has frustrated dreams of wealth and respectability. Hassan, the eldest, is the "tramp" of the family. He has given up school and is unable to keep a job. His choice of friends worries his family…
As each one, in his own way, struggles to better his or her condition and the condition of the family, new elements, such as interest in the other sex, arise to complicate the lives of the Kamel children…
In The Beginning and the End, Naguib Mahfouz tells the difficulty met by a family belonging to Cairo’s small bourgeoisie when its patriarch suddenly disappears. They struggle not only with poverty, but mainly with image, since poverty is not only hard because of the privations it implies but mostly because it is viewed as shameful. Mahfouz shows that even when the material situation gets better, the rest does not necessarily follow, since respectability brought by money is so much more important than money itself. Mahfouz’s characters are interesting: the daughter is a tragic character, a woman with an addiction, resembling an Emile Zola’s heroine. Hussein, the second son, is the good son, a man ready to make sacrifices for his family, and Hassanein, the youngest, is arrogant, selfish, ambitious and ultimately monstrous. Behind the destiny of the various characters, Mahfouz criticizes the Egyptian society of the forties, which leaves widows and orphans to fend for themselves, and shows how the oppressed sometimes becomes oppressors…
Rating: 4/5
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