Product Description

Set against the backdrop of the the theater, this novel is a taut psychological drama on and off the stage.  First published in 1981, this brilliant novel focuses on how time transforms people and their emotions.

From the Inside Flap

the backdrop of the the theater, this novel is a taut psychological drama on and off the stage.  First published in 1981, this brilliant novel focuses on how time transforms people and their emotions.

From Publishers Weekly

A new play is the talk of Cairo. Through the script, the author, a young unknown named Abbas Karam Younis, seems to implicate himself in the death of his ailing wife and the disclosure to the police of his mother, a prostitute, and his father, a gambler. Then Abbas mysteriously vanishes, leaving behind a suicide note but no corpse. Previously published here in a limited edition, this 1981 novel by the Egyptian Nobel laureate adopts the Faulkneresque device of employing a different character to narrate each chapter. All four accounts are marked by a deft blend of everyday details of Cairo life and compelling, stream-of-consciousness monologues. "Abbas could never betray his mother," she muses at one point. "He may have scorned everything else, but not my love. Love is stronger than evil itself." Throughout, Mahfouz probes the nature of art: what is real, what is fantasy. "A play is just a play. Nothing more," one character says. "Otherwise, the law would have the right to put ninety percent of our authors in the prisoner's dock." This transcendent book is evidence of how well Mahfouz's penetrating stories travel across cultural borders.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, his works range from reimaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. Over a career that lasted more than five decades, he wrote 33 novels, 13 short story anthologies, numerous plays, and 30 screenplays. Of his many works, most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of
Palace Walk (1956),
Palace of Desire (1957), and
Sugar Street (1957), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations, from 1917 until 1952. In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in Arabic to do so. He died in August 2006.

From the Publisher

Set against the backdrop of the the theater, this novel is a taut psychological drama on and off the stage. First published in 1981, this brilliant novel focuses on how time transforms people and their emotions.