ABSTRACT
A preoccupation with time is at the centre of Mahfouz’s work. A thought that has been uppermost in his writings has been how time affects the individual and the community and how human memory relates to external time. In this chapter I have grouped together some novels in which time is a prime concern. The first three novels treated here are all romans fleuves in the sense that they are concerned with the examination of the changing conditions of life for individuals and society across a succession of generations in a given family. However, of the three it is only The Cairo Trilogy which is written on the grand scale associated with this type of novel, as established by such European masters as Balzac, Zola and Mann. The other two are romans fleuves of a lesser order, cramming too many events and characters into what are very short novels, and more inclined towards the quick reportage of change than in its detailed representation and the creation of a real sense of the passage of time. Qushtumur, the fourth and last novel dealt with in this chapter, is not technically a roman fleuve. The reasons for including it here notwithstanding will be explained in the course of discussion of it.
