In one of his regular columns in Al-Ahram Weekly, Naguib Mahfouz at the age of 89 wrote of his feeling of having reached the penultimate station of his life, and noted how it reminded him of his annual journey from Cairo to Alexandria: at Sidi Gaber Station he begins to prepare his luggage, ready to get off the train, because the next station is the final one. This celebratory volume, published on the occasion of the Nobel laureate’s 90th birthday, brings together a selection of the more personal, reflective pieces that have appeared over the past seven years. They reveal a writer concerned as always with the human condition, with his own thought processes, and with the craft of writing, offering rare insights into the way a great writer thinks and works. The range and quality of writing is even more remarkable when one remembers that since a nearly fatal knife attack in 1994, the injuries Mahfouz sustained, combined with his failing eyesight, have made it almost impossible for him to write. But as a man who has devoted his life to the written word, Mahfouz now prepares his weekly articles through conversations with his friend Mohamed Salmawy, who has selected and gathered the pieces in this collection. Mahfouz fans and anyone interested in learning more about the life, times, and thoughts of one of the major figures of modern Arabic literature will find this volume an essential addition to their bookshelf.
Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber
Reflections of a Nobel Laureate, 1994–2001
From conversations with
Mohamed Salmawy
1 October 2004
160 pp.
13.5X21cm
ISBN 9789774246739
For sale worldwide
$22.95
Also available by this author
The Last Station
Naguib Mahfouz Looking Back
Mohamed SalmawyTranslated byAndy Smart
Nadia Fouda-Smart
In July 2006, at the age of 94, Naguib Mahfouz, the grand old man of Egyptian novels and winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1988, was admitted to hospital after an apparently minor fall sustained in his home in Cairo. Among the few friends allowed regular visits to Mahfouz’s hospital bedside was the writer Mohamed Salmawy, former colleague at Al-Ahram newspaper and, following the failed assassination attempt in 1994 when Mahfouz had lost the full use of his right hand, an assistant in recording Mahfouz’s late creative output. The Last Station, Mohamed Salmawy’s intimate journal of Naguib Mahfouz’s final weeks, sparkles with reminiscences of joyful times together and significant events from the great writer’s life. Even for those less familiar with the writings of Naguib Mahfouz, it portrays the closeness of two writers from different generations and celebrates the life of an incomparable artist.
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15 March 2008
Hardbound
120 pp.15X23cm
$22.95
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In the Time of Love
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Love—who can count its varieties, measure its force, uncover the masks it wears, or predict how it binds and divides? In this spare novel, master storyteller Naguib Mahfouz gives us some of his most memorable characters, widely familiar to Egyptians from the film version of the book: Sitt Ain, with her large house, her garden, her cats, and her familiar umbrella, strong and active, mother of the neighborhood; her son Izzat, so different from her, emotional and unsure of his way; and the friends of his childhood, Sayyida, Hamdoun, and Badriya, all their lives entangled and shaped over many years by the encounter of commitment, ambition, treachery, and above all love. This is a story in and of twentieth-century Egypt, which can be read on more than one level. The neighborhood and the motifs may be familiar, but they combine to tell a new and intriguing tale, with an unexpected outcome.
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Arabian Nights and Days
Naguib MahfouzTranslated by Denys Johnson-Davies
Drawing on the characters and the spirit of the classic A Thousand and One Nights, Arabian Nights and Days is a significant departure for Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Though he is best known for chronicling his own times, in this novel, first published in Arabic in 1982, Mahfouz injects new life into an Arabic masterpiece. Though it is set in an Islamic city in medieval times, the modern reader will find much in this novel that is surprisingly familiar. It depicts a city plagued by widespread corruption among its most powerful citizens, and a pervasive sense of social unrest and insecurity. The chief of police is kept particularly busy dealing with the underground activities of various religious sects that are intent on changing the unscrupulous regime. Amid all of this, as in the Thousand and One Nights, genies appear out of bottles accidentally opened by innocent individuals, affecting their lives in exciting, sometimes detrimental ways. Famed for his skill as a storyteller, Naguib Mahfouz has here produced a novel that is as colorful and entertaining as the book that inspired it.
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Dreams of Departure
The Last Dreams Published in the Nobel Laureate’s Lifetime
Naguib MahfouzTranslated byRaymond Stock
In this second collection of writing based on his own dreams, serialized in a Cairo magazine before his death in 2006, Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz again displays his matchless ability to tell epic stories in uncannily terse form. As in the first volume (The Dreams, AUC Press, 2004), we meet more of the real (and unreal) figures that filled the author’s life with glory and worry, ecstasy and ennui, in tales dreamed by a mind too fertile to ever truly rest. In them, a man sent by a victorious invader to open a storehouse holding the statue of Egypt’s reawakening finds his access denied by a menacing reptile. An obscure writer dies, and a despairing inscription on his coffin turns his funeral into a massive demonstration. A man opens a stubborn gate to stare at a lake over which loom the illuminated faces of those he has loved, but who are no more—in search of the soul who made him long to live forever. The ever more condensed and poetic episodes in Dreams of Departure movingly carry on Mahfouz’s only major work after a knife attack in 1994 ironically inspired him to dream in print for his readers.
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Naguib Mahfouz
His Life and Times
Rasheed El-EnanyNaguib Mahfouz (1911 –2006) is the only Arab writer to have been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The author of thirty-five novels, fifteen collections of short stories, twenty-five film screenplays, numerous critical works, and in his later years over five hundred short fictions based on his dreams (partly published as The Dreams and Dreams of Departure by the AUC Press in 2004 and 2007), he has been hugely influential on several generations of Arab writers, and his books are now read in more than forty languages around the world. In its citation for the Nobel prize, the Swedish Academy of Letters noted that Mahfouz “through works rich in nuance—now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous—has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind.” And he has been described by Nadine Gordimer as “one of the greatest creative talents in the realm of the novel in the world,” by Ahdaf Soueif as a “massively important influence on Arabic literature,” and by Alaa Al Aswany as “the founder of the new Arab novel . . . . our father.” In this first biography of Naguib Mahfouz in English, Rasheed El-Enany looks at the life of the man and the work of the writer, and assesses the oeuvre and legacy of a towering figure in the Egyptian and Arab literary world who was able to reach far beyond his own linguistic and cultural boundaries to an admiring readership across the globe.
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