Naguib Mahfouz is a never-ending source of literary surprises. 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 Kamil Ru’ba Laz, a young Egyptian man 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. The first person novel 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.
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Always focusing on aspects of Egyptian social and political history in his novels, Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz here depicts three generations of one family as they try to survive the socially tumultuous period between the Six Day War with Israel in 1967 and the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. The loss of the Six Day War in 1967 was a national humiliation for Egypt, which lost the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, as a result. Following the death of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, his successor President Anwar Sadat tried to regain the lost territories with a surprise attack that initiated the Yom Kippur War in 1973, but again Egypt failed to win a strong military victory. This tumultuous period was not only a period in which the nation suffered blows to its national self-image, both at home and among its neighboring Arab states, because of its military losses, but also a period of enormous economic hardships. Alternating points of view among his characters, Mahfouz creates a novel which shows the domestic difficulties faced by educated Egyptian city-dwellers as they try to live their lives under the less structured new economic system, which has replaced the system with which they have long been familiar.
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Posted in Egypt, Historical, Literary on Jan 15th, 2011
Written in 1974 and newly translated by Roger Allen, the novel takes place in the mid-1960s and focuses on the Karnak Café regulars as they respond to some key moments in contemporary Egyptian history. For the young people, “history began with the 1952 Revolution,” in which the army, led by a young officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Farouk, abolished the pro-British monarchy, and established a republic, inspiring other Middle Eastern and north African countries in an Arab sovereignty movement. In 1954, Nasser became President of Egypt. Hopes were high then and continue to be high for the young at the café in the early 1960s, despite the acknowledged (and continuing) problems with civil rights, poverty, and the abuses of the police. The three young people and their fates become the focus of the narrator when the young people inexplicably disappear for several months. Mafouz recreates in a mere one hundred pages the historical record of a country yearning to be free at the same time that he depicts the movements against individual freedom which are at their peak. (On the Favorites List for 2008)
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The search for dinosaur fossils amid sandstorms and desert heat is anything but dry in this lively story of the excavation in January, 2000, of a site in the western Egyptian desert, partially excavated by Ernst Stromer in 1911, but untouched since then. Nothdurft, a professional writer, working in concert with Josh Smith, the young paleontologist who was the team leader of the January, 2000, dig, tells the stories of both the 1911 and the 2000 excavations, along with the fossil discoveries made by each group. Stromer, a German aristocrat and meticulous paleontologist, found the fossils of four unique, 95-million-year-old dinosaurs in Bahariya in 1911, spent twenty years analyzing them, and then supervised the fossils’ installation at the Bavarian State College of Paleontology and Historical Geology in Munich. In April, 1944, everything was lost in the allied bombing of Munich.
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