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.

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.

Shipped earlier than promised and in good shape. Great experience.

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.

This was the least well-done book of the trilogy. It took me a long time to formulate into words my disappointment in this work. Mahfouz had great representation of everything that has happened in the recent history of Egypt, at the time when everything changed, with one family having a communist, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, *and* a man who advances up the ladder of increasing bureaucracy. Mahfouz continues to write vividly, with extremely real characters, that you believe, and that you are present with, within their heads. But the veiled references to homosexuality were unnecessary and distracting from the plot. And the book was too slice of life. The ending was far too sudden, incomplete, and unfulfilling. And in the end, this book, and this trilogy, becomes a writing of depression, sadness, and how lives are destroyed, lacking in hope, lacking in joy, lacking in truth.

One man, on patriarch, sets his family down the road of despair through his relentless despotism. He even warps their brains into thinking that what he does is a good thing, and his hypocrisy a virtue. This could be a great book in teaching the lesson of how we choose generational sins for our family- but it doesn't seem to actually try to teach this. This is the result of the work of the patriarch, but there is no foil to present for hope for the family. The only successful individual is the grandchild engaged in homosexuality who succeeds at bureaucracy. There is no redemption. The book becomes the anti-Dickens, a world without possibilities. And this is the greatest value of the book, perhaps- showing us the Egyptian culture, strangling it's citizens in red tape.

Great Expectations (Penguin Classics)

In the third part of "The Cairo Trilogy", life of the Abd al-Jawad family goes on. Amina's body now withered, her hair white, ill health and grief having altered her considerably. Her diligence and her capacity for running the household are now gone. She no longer pays attention to her home except for the services to her husband al-Sayyid Ahmad, once a vigorous man in full swing. He now suffers from high blood pressure and he had to give up many of the pleasures of life - drinks, women and good food. In fact, many months before dying, he is completely bedridden, a particularly humiliating situation for a man with such a strong ego.
Here Mr Mahfouz casts a compassionate glance at the irony of life which makes elderly people become utterly dependant on others, as they used to be when they were infants. For Kamal, now thirty-six, it is sad to see his family age, all the more since he refuses to get married and thus spends a lot of time aloof and lonely. Aiming at becoming a true intellectual, Kamal often collides with doubt and struggles with instincts and passions and is becoming "an emotionally crippled recluse". He often broods about his youth, his love for Aïda and the eternal loss of the enchanting past.
But there are also reasons to rejoice as the younger generation takes over and ascends in society. Marriages take place, careers are planned. Mr Mahfouz splendidly portrays this cycle of life in which the old generation gives way to the boisterous and cheerful young one. This is shown in the moving final scene when Kamal and his brother Yasin enter a store where the former buys several items for his daughter's baby while the latter buys a black necktie he will need when the mournful day of his mother's death arrives...

The conclusion and final disintegration of the formerly powerful patriarchal family. Brings one through the third generation of tradegy, loss, and spiritual transformation and leaves almost every individual in misery. I enjoyed the first and final books in this trilogy and feel I came away with a better understanding of the conflicting forces at work in Egypt as well as the impact of culture and morality on individual actions and spirituality.