Wedding Song (Afrāḥ al-Qubba), Najīb Maḥfūẓ
The novel that brought Maḥfūẓ the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 is another finely honed work by the Egyptian author. Once again, the plaudits that rang out at the awards ceremony in Sweden possess a real resonance and relevance – Maḥfūẓ “has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind”.
Maḥfūẓ, ever displaying versatility, recounts the creation of a
play by ‘Abbās Karām Yūnis, in which the lives of his characters bear disconcerting similarity to the men and women closest to the
playwright himself. The play’s success has many
repercussions on all those
involved, and casts a reflection on the past and future alike.
Yet Maḥfūẓ’s genius is to illuminate the reader as to these repercussions through the individual
perspectives of the four
people most closely involved. From Tariq Ramadan’s point of view as close friend and former husband to ‘Abbās’ wife, ‘Abbās’ entire family are immoral, crooked criminals, and only he can fully accept the implications of the play. For all that, by the time we come to appreciate the same
events through the eyes of the playwright’s father, mother, and finally the playwright himself, we unveil a host of relationship problems, fundamental differences in two people’s perceptions of the same events and even the same people, not to mention a different narrative timeline.
It is these fragments of the same conversations and meetings that Maḥfūẓ handles so gracefully, so when they overlap in two people’s recollections, they can be treated so differently, and thus suspicion can also be interpreted as anger, and desperation as immorality. The four strands of the story lead the reader to create the fifth, most telling perspective – his own, sewn together with the weight of the other perspectives at his fingertips. Herein lies the strength of Wedding Song’s structure, cementing the author’s adroitness at guiding the reader to make his own conclusions on the presented characters.
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