“When did she go broke? Has she in turn been robbed? This woman robbed us and deprive us our legal right.”
These words of outrage are spoken by the first-person narrator and directed to his family’s lawyer. They compose the final sentences of the first paragraph and the only sentence of the second paragraph. The bulk of what follows will send the reader backward in time to events which bring the story to that moment so that the movement forward in time from that moment gives that part of the story more emotional resonance. What starts off like a story that seems headed in one direction therefore surprises by ending up in a different place than many will expect, perhaps. For those not familiar with Islamic laws regarding polygamy or whose familiarity is corrupted through the outsider perspective of modern western values, it is also a very eye-opening story about the reality of that particular social convention.
“The aristocracies are the servants and the slaves who stole the peasant’s lands.”
Though featuring a story straight from the vaults of classic Universal Studios monsters café, this is much less a horror story than a political allegory. Although, in far more cases than is usually recognized, both of these those things are true. The Mummy in this allegory is the metaphorical personification of Egyptian history. It is the soul of Egypt. The politics here is one of reversal of fortune as time has marched on: the one mighty ruling class who lorded over Egypt has changed places with the servant class they once employed. This is the nature of history, a constant pushing and pulling operating along a high tension wire capable of upsetting the balance of those carefully treading along its straight line in an instant. The stories of Mahfouz are infused with the effect and consequence of history in a way that an American writer could never be. This is the advantage of living in a land whose recorded history goes back for millennia rather than centuries.
“Did you see what he looks like when he eats?...It’s quite amazing, unbelievable.”
“The Norwegian Rat” ends with the narrator relating how his wife—without any prompting by him—came to view a government bureaucrat commissioned to investigate an infestation of rats in an apartment building. It is a story of the paranoia which builds and spread like wildfire among the underprivileged. The most notable quote in the story actually occurs just a few paragraphs earlier in this very short tale and it has the narrator comparing the face of the bureaucrat to a cat. But it is not a cat to which the narrator’s wife is alluding when asks her husband what the man look like when he eats. Of course, he already knows because that is exactly what upset him: he looks like a rat. The transformation is the key element of this different sort of allegorical story.
