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From the Foreword by Nadine Gordimer: "These pieces are meditations which echo that which was, has been, and is the writer Mahfouz. They are—in the words of the title of one of the prose pieces—'The Dialogue of the Late Afternoon' of his life. I don't believe any autobiography, with its inevitable implication of self-presentation, could have
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From the Foreword by Nadine Gordimer: "These pieces are meditations which echo that which was, has been, and is the writer Mahfouz. They are—in the words of the title of one of the prose pieces—'The Dialogue of the Late Afternoon' of his life. I don't believe any autobiography, with its inevitable implication of self-presentation, could have matched what we have here."
With more than 500,000 copies of his books in print, Naguib Mahfouz has established a following of readers for whom Echoes of an Autobiography provides a unique opportunity to catch an intimate glimpse into the life and mind of this magnificent storyteller. Here, in his first work of nonfiction ever to be published in the United States, Mahfouz considers the myriad perplexities of existence, including preoccupations with old age, death, and life's transitory nature. A surprising and delightful departure from his bestselling and much-loved fiction, this unusual and thoughtful book is breathtaking evidence of the fact that Naguib Mahfouz is not only a "storyteller of the first order" (Vanity Fair), but also a profound thinker of the first order.
"This mosaic of autobiographical vignettes, reflections, allegories, childhood memories, dream visions, and Sufi-like spiritual maxims and paradoxes is a deep pool of wisdom that confirms his stature as a writer of universal appeal."—Publishers Weekly
Naguib Mahfouz, the 85-year-old Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner best known for his "Cairo Trilogy," packs a lifetime of wisdom and reverence into this slim new book. This is not a dry, academic "I was born here, studied there" recounting, but a series of half-page meditations which capture the essence of a writer deeply tuned in to the spirituality of the everyday.
Fellow Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer writes in her introduction that "For Mahfouz life is a search in which one must find one's own sign-posts." Throughout his remembrances, anecdotes, allegorical and mystical tales, Mahfouz concludes that rapture is found in being constantly open to the world, and that the most perfect moment in one's life may well be in "the fleeting look of contentment under the date palm" which is "the secret of life and its light." The entries are filled with a constant struggle between polarized ways of living: between the need for order and the freedom of anarchy, between the pureness of abstinence and the humanity of sensuality, between the urge to examine everything and the contentment of letting life flow. The latter part of the book is taken up with the musings of a mythical Sheikh abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih, a mystical figure who dwells in a desert cave that he refers to as a "tavern" because friends gathered there get drunk on the joy of communing with like-minded spirits. The Sheikh acts as a medium for Mahfouz to distill his Sufi-infused philosophy, a vision of acceptance, tolerance and a constant striving for the spiritual.
"The nearest man comes to his Lord is when he is exercising his freedom correctly," the Sheikh tells his followers. As the end of the book approaches, the entries get smaller and the pronouncements more precise, until they finally take on a Confucian simplicity. "As you love, so will you be," reads one entry called "The Secret." With Echoes of an Autobiography, Mahfouz has produced a fascinating and thought-provoking meditation on memory, love, spirituality and the eventuality of death. As the Sheikh says of Mahfouz, "O God, bestow upon him a good conclusion, which is love." -- Salon
In fact, Mahfouz's volume would be unrecognizable as autobiography to Western readers if it weren't for its title. Instead of presenting a straightforward narrative about his family in Cairo, his philosophical studies, his career in the civil service, and his 34 novels (Children of the Alley, 1996, etc.), Mahfouz collects 200 terse memories, parables, fictions, and fugitive moments, some narrated in the first person, some in the third, most no more than a few sentences long. Many of them read like distillations of the longer fables in Arabian Nights and Days (1995). A nine-month-old fetus worries about the dim prospect of an afterlife. A billiard player, refusing a game, says he prefers to play alone as others watch him, even though everyone else in the parlor is asleep. A man bothered by a commotion in the street stops trying to quiet the carousers when he suddenly sees them "in God's good time, as they hurried toward the grave." An old man and his wife recall how "they were brought together by love 30 years ago, then it had abandoned them along with the rest of their expectations." The majority of the characters here pass briefly and are gone, hustling off on their errands. Only one figure abides: Sheik Abd-Rabih al Ta'ih, whose Sufi-tinged apothegms on time and age, the ripeness of memory, the everlasting pursuit of love, and the shaping forces of death and faith ("There is no one more foolish than the foolish believer, except for the foolish unbeliever") dominate the last third of the book.
Readers looking for conventional revelations about the famously reticent Mahfouz will come away disappointed. For those more patient, the novelist offers a haunting commonplace book of tranquil wisdom.
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