Note: Naguib Mahfouz was WINNER of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, the first Arab author to win that prize.
My mother and my life were one and the same….Hardly can I think of any aspect of my life without her beautiful, loving face appearing before me. She stands ever and always behind both my hopes and my sufferings, behind both my love and my hatred….It’s as though she herself was everything I’ve ever loved or hated.”
Naguib Mahfouz is a never-ending source of literary surprises, and in this unusual and often charming novel from 1948, newly translated and republished by the American University of Cairo, Mahfouz writes his only Freudian, psychological study, an analysis of a young Egyptian, Kamil Ru’ba Laz. Kamil is so dominated by his mother that he is unable to make a single decision or form a single successful relationship with the outside world. When the novel opens, his mother has just died, and Kamil, in his mid-twenties, is devastated. Though he believes that “people who write are, generally speaking, people who aren’t alive,” he recognizes that he was not really alive before his mother’s death. He hopes that writing will allow him “to remember her and to recover her life…[so that] I may be able to repair the thread of my life that’s been broken.”
The first person nov
el which results is Kamil’s attempt to put his life into some sort of perspective and, perhaps, to find some hope for the future, some understanding of “life’s true wisdom,” a journey which will take him outside himself for the first time in his life. As Kamil takes the reader through his family history, other dysfunctional relationships within his family are revealed. His father, a man from a good family but with no job and a penchant for alcohol, frequently beat his wife, Kamil’s mother. She left him and returned to him several times, and eventually abandoned him forever, taking their children with her. Kamil, born after the abandonment, never knows his father. When Radiya and Medhat, the two older children, are aged ten and nine, however, their father claims them, in accordance with Islamic law, wresting them from their mother and preventing her from seeing them for many years, leaving her with only Kamil, a small child, to whom she now devotes her whole life.
His mother nurtures what Kamil later recognizes as an “unwholesome relationship…a kind of affection that destroys.” He is never out of his mother’s sight and is encouraged to depend on her totally—sleeping in the same room and having no sense of personal privacy. He grows up isolated, unable to meet other young people or have friends, terrified of the outside world, and excruciatingly shy, unable to speak to strangers. School is a disaster. Mocked by both teachers and students, he is not even allowed to take school field trips to see Egypt’s archaeological wonders–his mother refuses to give permission. As he grows up, he leads a “forlorn and friendless life,” but he does nothing to change this life. Only dreams bring escape. When he has reached his twenties and has started working as a clerk in the War Ministry, he notes, “I seem to have been destined not to know anything about life’s true wisdom, and I’d never gone beyond the narrow confines of my own soul.”
With a totally egocentric lif
e, and a mother who constantly massages that ego while simultaneously demanding his full attention, Kamil is certainly not a candidate for true love, but Mahfouz introduces Kamil’s desire for a wife as the turning point of the book. His search for love, his selection of the woman of his dreams, the complications this potential relationship creates with his mother, the effects of his pathological fears on any long-term relationship, and his complete naivete about sex and what it means to be a husband all reflect the influence of his early childhood on his adult life. Kamil, in his mid-twenties, is still a child, emotionally, unable to communicate with the outside world on any level. The conflict between his past and his dreams of a possible future drive Kamil to the breaking point.
Mahfouz has created in Kamil a main character whose weaknesses make him difficult to like, and now, sixty years after this book was written, it is somewhat difficult even to empathize with him since the world has changed so much. Still, Mahfouz’s use of a conversational style (ironic, considering Kamil’s difficulties with conversation), his narrative charm, and his easy-going humor about growing up keep the reader completely engaged, hoping for Kamil’s success even when tempted to give up on him as a lost cause. Firmly grounded in the psychological conundrum that Kamil represents, Mahfouz stays true to his subject as he explores the effects of the past on character, taking the extreme examples of Kamil and his mother to their limits to evaluate whether or not there is some kernel of individuality which can survive even the most extreme influences in order to preserve one’s essence and allow for growth in new and contrary directions. As Kamil faces his life at the end of the novel, we cannot be sure how successful he will be, but we, like Kamil, can always hope. Ultimately, Mahfouz makes the reader wonder which is the “mirage”–the reverence for the past or the dream of the future?
Notes: In his Nobel Prize lecture, Naguib Mahfouz avers that “In spite of all that goes on around us, I am committed to optimism until the end.” Here is the lecture.
His Wiki page is here.
His picture is from an obituary/memorial created by St Takla Church in Alexandria, Egypt
Also by Mahfouz: KARNAK CAFE, AKHENATEN: Dweller in Truth, THE DAY THE LEADER WAS KILLED, BEFORE THE THRONE, MORNING AND EVENING TALK, CAIRO MODERN
