I Found Myself
Last Dreams
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
I Found Myself: Last Dreams confirms again the richness and variety of Mahfouz's storytelling—"the single most important writer in modern Arabic literature" (Newsweek)
I found myself in our old house in El Abbassiya, visiting my mother. She received me with perplexing indifference and then left the room. I assumed she’d gone to make coffee, but she never returned. [Dream 216]
In his final years, the Egyptian master storyteller and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These last dreams, stunning poetic vignettes—now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar—appear here with dreamlike photographs by the famous American photographer Diana Matar, which both mysteriously rhyme with Mahfouz’s nocturnal reveries and, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn, open up the texts. These sketches and stories are tersely haunting miniatures. Recurring female characters may be figures of Cairo herself, especially one much-missed lover from Mahfouz’s youth. Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many beautiful women all float through these affecting brief tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in slumber. A tender and personal introduction by Hisham Matar, recollecting how he and his wife met Mahfouz in Cairo not long after the assassination attempt on the author, is moving and likewise indelible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The dreams in this elegant collection from Egyptian Nobel laureate Mahfouz (1911–2006) reveal hints of regret over losing a former lover and fears of repression, all tinged with the wistfulness of old age. In an evocative introduction to his translation, Matar shares a story of meeting Mahfouz at a gathering in 1994 Cairo, five years after the author survived a stabbing by a religious extremist over objections to his novel Children of Gebelawi. Matar also introduces his wife Diana's accompanying photographs, taken in the streets of Cairo around the time of his meeting with Mahfouz before such photography became impossible under the increasingly repressive Mubarak regime. The quotidian and spare scenes illuminate the images in Mahfouz's dreams, about encounters with friends or musings on landmarks. Glimpses of warfare and political upheaval are peppered throughout, often with a pessimistic view. Most impactful are the recurring dreams of Mahfouz's long-ago lover B and his continued desire for her, as he reads her obituary in one dream and she tells him to forget her in another, the latter of which yields the chilling line, "it was as though the very last candle had gone out." Lovers of international literature will appreciate these well-honed snapshots.
