By the time he wrote “Morning and Evening Talk” (1987), Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) could afford to experiment as few writers can. He had long ago written his realist masterpiece, “The Cairo Trilogy” (1957), and had followed it up with a profound religious allegory in “The Children of Gebelawi” (1959).

By 1987, when “Morning and Evening Talk” (American University in Cairo Press, 192 pages, $19.95) was first published in Egypt, Mahfouz was already an old master, looking for new ways to impose his totalizing imagination on the whole of Egypt’s long history. In “Arabian Nights and Days” (1979), he had picked up the tale of Shehezerade where “1001 Arabian Nights” left off; in “Before the Throne” (1983), he had imagined a trial in which all of Egypt’s leaders, from the Pharaohs to Anwar Sadat, were brought before the court of Osiris for judgment. It was for this comprehensiveness that Edward Said compared Mahfouz to Dante, who so ambitiously encompassed earthly history within supernatural models. “Morning and Evening Talk” is a more down-to-earth, secular book than “The Divine Comedy,” but it is based on an ancient, encyclopedic model.

In the classical period of Arabian culture, long before the novel was a glimmer on the horizon of Europe, the Arab biographical dictionary was a common form of literary production. It would present the lives of rulers, poets, and other important personages in alphabetical order. Just so, “Morning and Evening Talk,” recently published in a new translation by Christine Phillips, presents the biographies of 67 Egyptians, all related by blood or by marriage. The three men who start it all first became friends in 1798, the year Napoleon invaded Egypt, and Mahfouz follows their descendents, who eventually marry to create one massive family tree, through the 1980s.

J.M. Coetzee, writing about Mahfouz, remarked that Napoleon’s invasion meant the introduction of modern Western culture into the Middle East, an event that Arab culture was not always prepared to assimilate. Among the resultant problems, Mr. Coetzee mentions the Arab reception of the novel. If the history of the novel has been tied to the rise of bourgeois culture, with its secular European concerns of class, Bildung, and interiority, then would Arab cultures be able to simply replicate this particular art form?

It could be argued that Egypt, of all Middle Eastern countries, had the most advanced bourgeoisie and was therefore most suitable to novels. And indeed, Egypt has been the only Middle Eastern country to sustain a long tradition of the novel. Mahfouz, with his petit-bourgeois origins, has had his greatest success writing, in “The Cairo Trilogy,” about a greengrocer and his upwardly mobile children. And “Morning and Evening Talk” takes a form meant for nobles and applies it to the humble lives of ordinary men, turning a pre-modern form to a very modern, very European subject. This is an urban family epic.

The three men who begin the family are Yazid al-Misri, a homeless orphan who happens to know how to read; Ata al-Murakibi, another orphan, who managed to get a job in a shop and marry the owner’s daughter, and Shayk al-Qulyabi, a pious schoolteacher. Through five generations, their families experience British occupation, the first stirrings of nationalism, eventual independence, and the confusing triumph of General Nasser, followed by his entanglements with Israel. Yazid has two children: One is a humble fountain guard, while the other is kidnapped and taken to France, where he receives a medical education. Ata’s wife dies and he inherits the shop and marries a wealthy widow — two of his sons eventually become pashas. Shayk al-Qulyabi’s mystical-minded daughter, Radia, marries one of the fountain guard’s sons, Amr Effendi, creating a middle-class family of extraordinary personality. Their children and those children’s cousins form the backbone of the novel — as an aggregate, they become “living examples of success and failure,” embodying the play of chaos and fate that constitutes history, as lived from individual to individual.

And yet, despite its bourgeois concerns, “Morning and Evening Talk” is experimental because it moves so quickly through such complex territory. Sixty-seven characters in 200 pages is a lot to keep up with, and the reference-work format assumes that each entry is its own beginning — therefore the novel has no learning curve, it simply plunges through information at random. I drew a family tree to keep track, making for a very crowded and messy legal pad. This can be an enjoyable exercise, but it means the reader spends less time empathizing with the characters than the author might have hoped.

Yet Mahfouz delivers two significant emotional lessons. The first comes with the encyclopedia-entry format. Necessarily brief, these mini-bios tend to emphasize childhood and courtship, and then end with a long, telescoping paragraph that speeds through adulthood toward death — this is talk at evening, as opposed to talk at morning. The other lesson is that, even among the clutter of so much biography, remarkable personalities will always stand out. Mystical Radia and her epileptic son, Quasim, prove that there is a golden thread of charisma in every family’s memory.

Though it is not one of Mahfouz’s best works, “Morning and Evening Talk” offers a unique argument for the Arabic novel. It treats a great deal of traditional novelistic information in the raw, applying old Arabic forms in an innovative, experimental way. As such, it also proves the large-canvas confidence that led Mahfouz to the Nobel Prize only one year later, in 1988.

blytal@nysun.com