Palace Walk Critical Essay | Critical Review by Jake Morrissey

Critical Review by Jake Morrissey

SOURCE: “Sleep Walk,” in National Review, Vol. XLII, No. 3, February 19, 1990, pp. 51–52.

In the following negative review of Palace Walk, Morrissey unfavorably compares the novel to the work of Charles Dickens, asserting that it “lacks the verve and structure that made Dickens so readable.”

When the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988—the first Arab writer to be so honored—it wasn't owing to his world-wide reputation. In fact, in the United States, Mahfouz had virtually no reputation at all; few critics and fewer readers had ever heard of him. The New York Times reported that when the Swedish Academy of Letters disclosed that Mahfouz had been given the Nobel, those who had gathered in Stockholm for the announcement “dispersed quietly and quickly. One said later that she and others had immediately gone searching for copies of Mr. Mahfouz's writings in local bookstores....
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