Between 1945 and 1957 Mahfouz published what one can describe as “realist” novels, including Khan el-Khalili, Midaq Alley, The Mirage, The Beginning and the End, and the Cairo Trilogy, for which he was awarded the State Prize for Literature in 1957. Since 1959 Mahfouz’s novels have taken a different turn, making use of symbolism and allegory to achieve fresh philosophical and psychological dimensions. Critics regard much of his more recent work as experimental.

Any novelist learns from his predecessors. The novel is young in Arabic and Mahfouz has perforce absorbed the work of many non-Arab writers. Chief among them, according to his own testimony, are Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, all of whom he has read in French. Perhaps the most important Western influence, however, has been that of Proust. As a university student Mahfouz made a special study of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Proust’s cousin, who had codified elements that would later become central to Proust’s work; and his subsequent intensive reading of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu has had a lasting impact, especially on his idea of time.

Time is a constant theme in all his novels and a constant preoccupation of his characters. Mahfouz’s works are typically laced with sentences—such as “Time is a terrible companion,” “What has time done to my friend? It has imposed a hideous mask on his face”—that suggest almost a horror temporis.

In this novel we are prompted to see how time works changes, transforming love into hate, beauty into ugliness, loyalty into treachery, idealism into debauchery, leaving its marks on Tariq Ramadan, Karam Younis, Halima al-Kabsh, Abbas Karam Younis, and even on the old house where Abbas grew up. Like all the novels of Mahfouz, Wedding Song may thus be regarded in part as a history of time and its impact on character. Avoiding such commonplace information as the age of the protagonists, Mahfouz gives us instead an evocation of what has happened to their features, their bodies, the looks in their eyes, the despair in their hearts. The techniques he favors for such evocation—stream of consciousness and interior monologue—lead to narratives in the first person. Each of his main characters thus tells his or her own story, supplies us with only a personal interpretation, creates in effect his or her own theatrical drama out of the raw materials of life. The future of each may be unknown, lost in the intricacies of present and past, which are woven by each character into a single dark strand that he or she follows alone, but even Abbas, despite his success, momentarily believes that death is, sooner or later, the only future for him, as well as for all mankind.