Egypt

Fiction Review: Morning and Evening Talk

The Financial Times (Review by Maureen Freely)

Morning and Evening Talk: A Modern Arabic Novel By Naguib Mahfouz
Translated by Christina Phillips
American University in Cairo Press

If the universal is the local without walls, the late writer Naguib Mahfouz was its master. Though most of his work was set in his native Cairo, each of his neighbourhoods was distinct from all others. His characters defied generalisation, even as they reflected the customs, conditions and political upheavals of the day. The same might be said of the author. When he won the Nobel prize in 1988, Mahfouz was praised for creating “an Arabian narrative art” that applied “to all mankind”. Because he was the first winner from the Arab world, the emphasis was on his nationality. But what really set him apart was his narrative artistry.

Mahfouz died in 2006. In Morning and Evening Talk, his last novel, he sets the bar high, refusing all the classical unities. Instead of rooting his story in one place, he flits between Cairo and the countryside. Instead of following a chronology, he races back and forth along a 200-year timeline. And instead of one story, he offers us 67. Each takes the form of an informal obituary – a life as it might be described by a wise neighbour. Together they describe the fortunes of three families joined by friendship, feuds and marriage.

See the above page for the entire review.

- Profile: Britta Le Va (photographer Of The Cairo Museum)
Egypt Today (Nadine El-Sayed) There are few who can claim to be as deeply involved in such a variety of Egypt-related work. It was Le Va’s keen photographic eye that inspired Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, to ask her to photograph...

- Review: Audio Version Of The Cairo Trilogy
The Observer (Review by Rachel Redford) The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz. Full-cast production starring Omar Sharif Download at bbcaudiozone.com In three parts, 57mins/£3.60 each. This is a Sony award-winning production of the late Naguib Mahfouz's...

- Obituaries: Naguib Mahfouz
http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20060909-101228-8126r.htm"Naguib Mahfouz wrote about his Cairo not as an abstraction but as one long street of shopkeepers, government employees, pensioners, quiet decent people and the other kind, the small-time...

- Naguib Mahfouz Dies
http://tinyurl.com/mz5dh (aljazeera.com) Not an Egyptology item, but something that I think many people will be sad to read: "Let me pay a tribute to Egypt's Nobel Prize-winning writer Naguib Mahfouz who died today at the age of 94, following a long...

- Book Review: Mahfouz On Ancient Egypt
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2002672675_mahfouz11.html"Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz is best known for "The Cairo Trilogy," his saga about a modern Egyptian family living under British colonial rule between the two world wars....

Egypt