Morning and Evening Talk

He arrived in Cairo a few days before the French campaign. He was from a family of herbalists in Alexandria. When the epidemic spread, it decimated its members, leaving no man or woman but him. He hated the country and decided to head for Cairo. He had some money and a rare advantage at the time: he knew how to read and write. He learned it at the religious institute before abandoning it to help his father in the herbalist trade. He wandered around Cairo for a while until he found shelter in a house in Al-Ghuriya. He also found work as a treasurer at the Warraq Agency. He was a strong, dark-skinned young man with clear features.

A new literary masterpiece woven by the legendary novelist Naguib Mahfouz, spanning five generations spanning two centuries, from the French campaign in Egypt, when the great-grandfather and founder of the family, Yazid al-Masry, came to Cairo from Alexandria, which was then stricken by the epidemic, to the 1980s, when the generation of great-grandchildren chronicled the social history of Egyptians and the political and economic influences on it. A flowing human river that emphasizes the continuity of life and the inevitability of death. In this work, Mahfouz departs from the traditional chronological framework of events, focusing on the individual rather than the event. He divides the novel into characters arranged alphabetically. While the grandson comes first, we arrive at the first founder at the end, as if to allude to humanity’s constant search for its origins and the foundation of its formation. He takes us through two centuries of the family’s history and the history of Cairo, observing the Egyptian family tree.