Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz, famed for his uncanny power to depict the real world, is equally ingenious at capturing the surreal, the otherworldly, and the supernatural. The ghostly side of Mahfouz’s fiction, though less well known than his other works, nonetheless remains a haunting presence. This collection of stories sifted from his later writings brings these restless spirits out of the Mahfouzian shadows together for the first time in English: A murdered man finds himself in the first level of what he mistakes for Paradise—where he faces, along with historical figures such as Akhenaten, Woodrow Wilson, and Gamal Abd al-Nasser, a strange system of earthly probation that may (or may not) get him to the fabled Seventh Heaven. A teenager is warned not to go near the allegedly haunted wood in his neighborhood, only to be drawn into the secret, enchanted life he finds within it. An honest perfume seller is accosted on a night out by angry skeletons, who threaten to march upon his alley as an avenging army if the sinners there do not change their ways. Satan speaks to us directly—to confess that there is still, despite the flood of evil in our times, an honorable man in the land. These and the other startling stories in The Seventh Heaven make a vivid contribution to the translated works of Egypt’s—and the Arab world’s—greatest modern author.

A thriller in form, a political and ethical analysis in substance. A professional thief and would-be killer, Said is an Egyptian Robin Hood whose thefts are motivated by powerful egalitarian principles, as well as by bitterness. His burning desire for revenge against those who betrayed him to the police carries him to the heights and depths of Cairo society during the early years of the 1952 Revolution.

These twenty stories represent nearly thirty years of Mahfouz’s career. Selected and translated by the distinguished scholar Denys Johnson-Davies, they have all the celebrated and distinctive characters and qualities found in Mahfouz’s novels: the denizens of the narrow alleyways of Cairo; dark ruminations on death; experiments with the supernatural; and witty excursions into Cairene middle-class life.

This is the story of a theatrical family of Cairo, whose playwright son exposes its most intimate and sordid secrets on the stage in his first play. The story is told four times from four different viewpoints: that of the family acquaintance, the father, the mother, and Abbas, the son, who is the central character.

This paperback compendium edition combines Naguib Mahfouz’s first three novels, all set in ancient Egypt, which skillfully explore recurring themes within human relationships: the balance between destiny and individual agency, the sanctity of the bonds to the land and religion, and the constant power struggles that affect human lives at multiple levels. In Khufu’s Wisdom, translated by Raymond Stock, Pharaoh Khufu is battling the Fates. At stake is the inheritance of Egypt’s throne, the proud but tender heart of Khufu’s beautiful daughter Princess Meresankh, and Khufu’s legacy as a sage, not savage, ruler. Rhadopis of Nubia, translated by Anthony Calderbank, follows the powerful love that grows between Rhadopis, a courtesan whose ravishing beauty is unmatched in time or place, and youthful, headstrong Pharaoh Merenra, worshiped by his people as a divine presence on earth, against the background of the high politics of Sixth Dynasty Egypt. Finally, in Thebes at War, translated by Humphrey Davies and written in 1937–1938 when Britain and Turkey held sway over Egypt, Mahfouz dramatically depicts the Egyptian people’s undying loyalty to their land and religion and their refusal to bow to outside domination. After two hundred years of occupation, the Hyksos leader in his capital in northern Egypt tells Pharaoh in the south that the roaring of the sacred hippopotami at Thebes is keeping him awake at night and demands that they be killed, galvanizing Egypt into hurling its armies into a struggle to drive the barbarians from its sacred soil forever.

This is the story of one man and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Isa al-Dabbagh is a senior civil servant in the Egyptian government who loses his job and his fiancée when the Purge Committees of the Revolution bring his venal past to light. His personal relationships reflect the resulting internal conflict he suffers between mind and heart, between intellectual acceptance of the Revolution and the basic emotional instincts that hold him back.

In Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz tells with remarkable insight the story of the ‘heretic’ pharaoh whose iconoclastic and controversial career has such resonance with modern sensibilities. Years after the king’s death, a young man with a passion for the truth questions the pharaoh’s contemporaries—including his closest friends, his bitterest enemies, and his enigmatic wife Nefertiti—in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten’s court. As they each report their version of events, Mahfouz allows his readers to decide for themselves the truth about Akhenaten.

In this second volume of The Cairo Trilogy, the master storyteller spins a sensual, provocative tale, following the al-Jawad family into the awakening world of the 1920s, where increased freedoms prove as troubling as domination and repression once did. Like Palace Walk, Palace of Desire affords a fascinating look at a period of modern Egyptian history by lovingly and painstakingly examining the day-to-day lives of a single family.

In this final volume of Naguib Mahfouz’s masterpiece trilogy, al-Sayyid Ahmad is aging, ill, and confined behind the mashrabeya that once confined his wife. But in his grandsons we see a modern Egypt emerging: one becomes a communist activist, another a Muslim fundamentalist, both working for what they believe will be a better world. And a third launches a promising political career abetted by a homosexual relationship with a prominent politician.

Jaafar Ibrahim Sayyed al-Rawi is guided by his motto, “let life be filled with holy madness to the last breath.” He narrates his life story to a friend during one long night in a café in old Cairo. Through a series of bad decisions, he has lost everything: his family, his position in society, and his fortune. A man driven by his passions, he married a beautiful Bedouin nomad for love, and as a consequence pays a punishingly high price. From a life of comfort with a promising future guaranteed by his wealthy grandfather, he descended to the spartan life of a pauper, after being disinherited. Jaafar faces his tribulations with surprising stoicism and hope, sustained by his strong convictions, his spirituality, his sense of mission, and his deep desire to bring social justice to his people.
Heart of the Night is a classic Mahfouz gem exploring marriage across class lines, spirituality, and the harsh realities of a precarious life written by one of Egypt’s most celebrated literary masters.

Set in Cairo in the early 1950s, this novel portrays the psychological torment of Omar, an ardent
revolutionary in his youth who in middle age has been left behind by Nasser’s 1952 Revolution.
His conscience has died. As he struggles for psychological renewal, he sacrifices his work and
his family to a series of illicit love affairs, which simply increase his alienation from himself and
from the rest of the world.