faber and faber, 2012, 758 p. Translated from the Spanish La guerra del fin del mundo with no translator’s name given, merely a translation copyright notice for the book’s first US publisher. Returned to a threatened library.

An itinerant mystic, Antonio Conselheiro, called the Counsellor, wanders the Brazilian province of Bahia gathering adherents. He preaches against the recently formed Republic of Brazil as the Antichrist, stuffed with Freemasons. In Llosa’s account he has the ability to transform an assortment of unfortunates, misfits, and the misshapen – not to mention the worst of bandits – into followers of the Blessed Jesus (whose every mention among the Counsellor’s adherents is replied to with “Blessed be he”.) Eventually he sets up a community in the town of Canudos against which a succession of ever larger military expeditions is sent by the Republic as the “rebellion” defeats each in turn. All this is based on a historical event, the War of Canudos, the most bloody civil war in Brazil’s history.

The early part of the novel is taken up with sections relating to how some of the Counsellor’s most important followers come to fall under his spell interspersed with the machinations of local politicians in Bahia – both for and against the Republic. Here we also meet a socialist (and red-haired) Scotsman on the run from authorities in Europe – where he had indulged in seditious activities – who goes by the name of Galileo Gall (but whose real name is never given) and has a belief in phrenology. Gall is framed by the editor of the Jornal de Notícias, Epaminondas Gonçalves, to make it look as though Britain, referred to by most characters as England, is involved in gun-running to, and support of, the rebels of Canudos. (“Gall” does put Gonçalves right, though, when he says, “I’m a Scotsman. I hate the English.”) A near-sighted journalist – again nameless – goes along with the third military force to be sent against the rebels and witnesses most of the later fighting; at least until his spectacles get broken.

Entrants to Canudos were made to swear that they were not Republicans, did not accept the expulsion of the Emperor, nor the separation of Church and State, nor civil marriage, nor the new system of weight and measures, nor the census questions. (The devil is obviously in the way you count the spoons.) Mostly though, the Counsellor was playing on the faith of the poor and their fears that slavery would be reintroduced.

Gall thinks of Canudos as, “A libertarian citadel, without money, without masters, without politics, without priests, without bankers, without landowners, a world built with the faith and the blood of the poorest of the poor,” (though part of that is his own idealism projected onto it) and wonders about the – to him – curious code of “Honour, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilious codes of conduct….. a vow, a man’s word, those luxuries and games of rich, or idlers and parasites – how to understand their existence here?” that so prevailed on the husband of a woman he raped that he pursued Gall there.

About a third of the way through the book we find the nameless journalist has survived the war as he talks to the Baron de Canabrava about his experiences. This has the effect of defusing some of the tension as we readers are still to meet them for ourselves.

In Canudos the near-sighted journalist thought to himself, ‘culture, knowledge were lies, dead weight, blindfolds. All that reading – and it had been of no use whatsoever in helping him to escape.’ The baron is disgusted by the journalist finding amid the chaos of Canudos love and pleasure with a peasant girl. “Did those words not call to mind luxury, refinement, sensibility, elegance, the rites and the ripe wisdom of an imagination nourished by wide reading, travels, education?”

Army doctor Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti’s image of humanity abruptly darkened in his weeks seeing to the wounded during the siege, observing of the able-bodied, “‘It is not what is most sublime, but what is most sordid and abject, the hunger for filthy lucre, greed, that is aroused in the presence of death.’”

The novel feels like it has a cast of thousands. There are multiple viewpoint characters and a narrative which shifts from present to past tense and back in section to section. This makes for a dry and slow start as the life stories of the Counsellor’s adherents prior to their falling in with him and those of the politicians of Bahia are told to us rather than shown. But, as the near-sighted journalist tells Baron de Canabrava, “‘Canudos isn’t a story; it’s a tree of stories.’” In telling his tale, Llosa tries to encompass this world of many branches. Some characters return again and again, others only appear in the scene in which we are given their viewpoint. 758 pages are a lot to fill after all. At times it becomes almost too much; but to recount a tree of stories does require length, a length which adds to the impression that this is a very male book. After all, war and revolution attract a certain kind of attention and are accorded an importance that other aspects of human endeavour are not.

Nearly all human life is in The War of the End of the World. Nearly all.

Aside:- In the scenes dealing with military men there are several references to Brazil’s war with Paraguay, which took place in the days of the Brazilian Empire. In Colin Wilson’s history of the goalkeeper, The Outsider, he stated that Brazil had never fought a war. That would be the Brazilian Republic rather than “Brazil” then.

Pedant’s corner:- The translation is into USian but curiously we had “fitted” once and “trousers” twice. Otherwise there were Jesus’ (Jesus’s,) “the Scotsman thought to himself: ‘The Republic has as little strength in Bahia as the King of England beyond the Aberfoyle Pass in the days of Rob Roy Macgregor.’” (The King of England? At that time the King was King of Scotland too. And it’s MacGregor.) “A host of questions were running riot in his head” (a host was,) laughingstock (laughing stock,) rear guard (the military terminology is usually rearguard,) ipso facto is used in the sense of “immediately” (it actually means “as a result of that fact”,) “a group of servants were” (a group was,) dumfounded (I prefer dumbfounded.) “They finally learn a little about what was gone on” (has gone on,) “he’s just dying little little, second by second” (little by little,) sunk (sank,) in a cross fire (crossfire,) chasseurs were mowed down (mowed down appeared at least twice; is this USian? In English it’s mown down.) Quite a few instances of “time interval” later.

Black Swan, 1997, 423 p. Translated from the Arabic Qasr al-Shawq by William Maynard Hutchins, Lorne M Kenny and Olive E Kenny

Originally published in 1957, this, the second part of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, follows on from Palace Walk and takes up the story of al-Sayyid Ahmad abd al-Jawad’s family some five years after the death of his son Fahmy in the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. His wife Amina remains grief stricken, his daughters are now both married into the Shawkat family, where Khadija is at odds with her mother-in-law, but the story focuses mainly on his first son (by a previous marriage) Yasin and his youngest son Kamal, on the cusp of adulthood. One curiosity:- in Palace Walk the standard of feminine beauty lay towards the ample, in Palace of Desire the more upper class Egyptians – though Mahfouz doesn’t really give us any below what might be called middle class – are beginning to lean towards a thinner ideal.

While Yasin now lives in Palace of Desire Alley the title of this second novel in the trilogy is indicative, since sexual longing threads the book. Ahmad himself returns to his extra-marital dalliances after a period of abstinence due to his mourning and sets up the lute player Zanuba on a houseboat as his mistress. Yasin is enamoured of women generally but serially disappointed by marriage. His second one, to next door neighbour Maryam, is as unfulfilling as was his first to Zaynab. At one point he tells Kamal that, “nothing works with women except beating them with a shoe.” A chance encounter with Zanuba (with whom he had an association as a bachelor) leads to her separation from Ahmad and marriage to Yasin. Neither Zanuba nor Ahmad were aware of their mutual connections.

Kamal also falls under the spell of love. He is smitten by Aïda Shaddad, the sister of one of his friends. She gets engaged and married to another, though. As a result Kamal loses his hitherto strong Muslim faith and begins to indulge in alcohol and women. He muses, “Love’s an illness, even though it resembles cancer in having kept its secrets from medical science,” and on a forced visit to the mosque to give thanks for his father’s recovery from serious illness thinks, “The most ancient remaining human structures are temples. Even today no area is free of them.”

As with Palace Walk the book takes a long time to get going. The prose is dense with the characters’ reflections and can seem long-winded. Whether this is due to the translation is impossible to tell but once again USianisms fail to ring true. Calling someone “buster” as a form of put down struck me as not very Egyptian, at any rate.

The third volume, Sugar Street (where the Shawkat families reside) awaits.

Translated from the Arabic, Layali alf layla, by Denys Johnson-Davies

The American University in Cairo Press, 2005, 229p

I bought this in a charity shop on our October trip down south. I had been wishing to sample Mahfouz’s fiction for some time but was also intrigued by the “EgyptAir Duty Free” sticker on the back! It’s a 2005 reprint of a 1995 translation of a 1979 publication.

It takes as its template the tales of One Thousand and One Nights but begins where that ends as the Sultan Shahriyar decides to marry the Nights’ spinner of stories Shahrzad.

It’s many years since I read the Arabian Nights so I’m not certain how closely this reflects those tales but some incidents seemed familiar. Well-known names do appear, such as Aladdin (who here has no magic lamp) and Sindbad (a several times shipwrecked sailor) and there was a resonance about a call to open a door. Genies – Singam and Qumqam, Sakhrabout and Zarmabaha – ply their trickery on the inhabitants of the city. Not even the Sultan escapes their attentions. Humans dance to their tunes as if free will does not exist. The authorities seem much exercised over the activities of heretics like the Shiites and Kharijites (the second of whom I’d never heard of before. Wiki has this.)

I also don’t have enough knowledge of Egyptian politics of the 1970s to tell whether it’s an oblique comment on them though since the book dwells on corruption in high places it may very well. That’s a timeless (and ubiquitous) failing in any case.

The structure is episodic; it’s really a series of connected short stories – as was One Thousand and One Nights.

There’s a distancing inherent in any translation but especially in tales such as these, steeped in a culture different from the one to which I’m used; there are doubtless many references I missed.

I’ll look out for more by Mahfouz.