'Do you have the right to a pension if — God forbid — you are actually dismissed?'
'… But he took a branch in one hand and a stone in the other and set off cautiously, looking away down a road that had no end…'
The End
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, he has been influenced by many Western writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and, above all, Proust. He has more than thirty novels to his credit, ranging from his earliest historical romances to his most recent experimental novels. In 1988, Mr. Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in the Cairo suburb of Agouza with his wife and two daughters.
Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.
BOOK JACKET
For the thousands of devoted readers of Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy, Adrift on the Nile — first published in Arabic in 1966 — will be an exciting and dramatic change of pace. In elegant and economic prose, Mahfouz creates — out of the simplest of plots — a telling commentary on human nature.
It is the late sixties, and for the group of friends who meet night after night on a houseboat moored along the banks of the Nile, life is not what it used to be. Nasser has ushered in an age of enormous social change; responsibility is the watchword, and there is no time for the frivolous or the absurd. In this serious world, the theory of 'art for art's sake' has been usurped by the concepts of committed theater, social realism, and art with a message for the people. These middle-aged and middle-class sons and daughters of the old bourgeoisie are left high and dry, to gather beneath the moonlight, smoking and chatting, hoping to re-create the cozy and enchanted world they so dearly miss. Their witty sallies are as inconsequential as the midges that weave around the lamp. They wistfully hark back to the High Middle Ages of the Mamluk sultans. Their constant companion is the pipe, filled with kif or hashish, whose heady smoke provides oblivion from their existential terror and despair. But one night, art and reality collide — with unforeseen consequences.
At once thrilling and deeply serious,
Adrift on the Nile is a tale that exposes the crisis of man — and artist — in modern times.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
'Throughout Mahfouz's fiction there is a pervasive sense of metaphor, of a literary artist who is using his fiction to speak directly and unequivocally to the condition of his country. His work is imbued with love for Egypt and its people, but is also utterly honest and unsentimental.'
— Washington Post 'Naguib Mahfouz is the greatest writer in one of the most widely understood languages in the world, a storyteller of the first order in any idiom.'
— Vanity Fair 'What is fascinating about this refreshingly gifted writer is that his fiction is at once simple and subtle, serious and ironic, realistic and symbolic, local and universal.
Naguib Mahfouz is a writer to read and admire.'
— Toronto Globe 'Naguib Mahfouz virtually invented the novel as an Arab form. He excels at fusing deep emotion and soap opera.'
— New York Times Book Review 'Mahfouz is the single most important writer in modern Arabic literature.'
