On Naguib Mahfouz
"No corner of Egyptian life was foreign to him: his characters are pharaohs and whores, shopkeepers and bureaucrats, peasants and presidents. Part of Mahfouz’s achievement is its sheer extent, its superabundant precision, a kind of indigenous update of the Encyclopedists’ Description de l’Egypt. It is the size of his ambitions that make it so natural to compare him with the giants of the nineteenth century—Balzac, Dickens and Zola..."