Product Description

This is a major early novel by the Egyptian Nobel laureate, published for the first time in English. The novelist's camera pans from the dome of King Fuad University (now Cairo University) to students streaming out of the campus, focusing on four students in their twenties, each representing a different trend in Egypt in the 1930s. Finally the camera comes to rest on Mahgub Abd al-Da'im. A scamp, he fancies himself a nihilist, a hedonist, an egotist, but his personal vulnerability is soon revealed by a family crisis back home in al-Qanatir, a dusty, provincial town on the Nile that is also a popular destination for Cairene day-trippers.Mahgub, like many characters in works by Naguib Mahfouz, has a hard time finding the correct setting on his ambition gauge. His emotional life also fluctuates between the extremes of a street girl, who makes her living gathering cigarette butts, and his wealthy cousin Tahiya. Since he thinks that virtue is merely a social construct, how far will our would-be nihilist go in trying to fulfill his unbridled ambitions? What if he discovers that high society is more corrupt and cynical than he is? With a wink back at Goethe's Faust and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Mahgub becomes a willing collaborator in his own corruption.Published in Arabic in the 1940s, this cautionary morality tale about self-defeating egoism and ill-digested foreign philosophies comes from the same period as one of the writer's best-known works, "Midaq Alley". Both novels are comic and heart-felt indictments not so much of Egyptian society between the world wars as of human nature and our paltry attempts to establish just societies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #552359 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 242 pages

About the Author
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (1911-2006) was born in the crowded Cairo district of Gamaliya. He graduated in philosophy from King Fuad University in 1934, and went on to write nearly forty novel-length works, plus hundreds of short stories and numerous screenplays. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988. WILLIAM M. HUTCHINS is the principal translator of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, and has most recently translated Mohammed Khudayyir's Basrayatha (AUC Press, 2007), Fadhil al-Azzawi's The Last of the Angels (AUC Press, 2007), and Cell Block Five (AUC Press, 2008).

Customer Reviews

Cynicism, audacity and ambition without limits
In this novel dominated by a selfish and vicious character, Naguib Mahfouz paints a blackish portrait of his home country, Egypt. The country is undermined by the cancer of poverty (the chasm between the haves and the have-nots), of corruption (the completely biased nomination process of civil servants, bid rigging, fraudulent elections) and of nepotism (the crucial questions are: do you have someone to pull the strings to get you this job? Can you ask the hand of the daughter of a powerful civil servant?)

His world vision is also pessimistic: only money is important and protects a powerful cartel of corrupted people in high places.
For him, religion is only a tiny varnish: a small minority of believers is exploiting the sufferings of many millions of fellow believers.

In this story of the merciless struggle for survival by a destitute, but cynical and opportunistic, student Naguib Mahfouz depicts frankly the violent personal and familial confrontations and the biting and obscene schemings of those in power. He also has no fear to revile bluntly social institutions, like marriage or the civil bureaucracy.
This book is a must read for all lovers of world literature.