Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

from murdering Ahmose when he has once again wounded Rukh. Ahmose asks what made her take upon herself ‘the inconvenience’ of saving his life. She answers in character: ‘To make you my debtor for it.’ But this is more than sharply aphoristic. If he is somehow to pay he must return to his creditor; her way of asking when she will see again the man she knows as Isfinis. And his declaration of love is made, he will return, ‘my lady, by this life of mine which belongs to you'.

His father Kamose refuses to allow him to return in the person of merchant Isfinis. He will go in his own person, Ahmose, only when ‘the day of struggle dawns'. Out of the silence of parting comes a letter. In the envelope is the chain of the green heart necklace. Amenridis writes she is saddened to inform him that a pygmy she has taken into her quarters as a pet has disappeared. ‘Is it possible for you to send me a new pygmy, one who knows how to be true?’ Mahfouz discards apparent sentimentality for startling evidence of deep feeling, just as he is able to dismantle melodrama with the harshness of genuine human confrontation. Desolate Ahmose: ‘She would, indeed, always see him as the inconstant pygmy.'

The moral ambiguity of a love is overwhelmed by the moral ambiguities darkening the shed blood of even a just war. The day of struggle comes bearing all this, and Kamose with Ahmose eventually leads the Theban army to victory, the kingdom is restored to the Thebes.

Mahfouz like Thomas Mann is master of irony, with its tugging undertow of loss. Apophis and his people, his daughter, have left Memphis in defeat. It is a beautiful evening of peace. Ahmose and his wife Nefertari are on the palace balcony, overlooking the Nile. His fingers are playing with a golden chain. She notices: ‘How lovely! But it's broken.’ ‘Yes. It has lost its heart.’ ‘What a pity!’ In her innocent naivety, she assumes the chain is for her. But he says, “I have put aside for you something more precious and more beautiful than that… Nefertari, I want you to call me Isfinis, for it's a name I love and I love those who love it.'

‘Are you still writing?’

People whose retirement from working life has a date, set as the date of birth and the date of death yet to come, ask this question of a writer. But there's no trade union decision bound upon writers; they leave practising the art of the word only when their ability to transform with it something of the mystery of human life, leaves them.

Yes, in old age Naguib Mahfouz was still writing. Still finding new literary modes to express the changing consciousness of succeeding eras with which his genius created this trilogy and his entire oeuvre, novels and stories. In the rising babble of our millennium, radio, television, mobile phone, his mode for the written word is distillation. In a recent work, The Dreams, short prose evocations drawing on the fragmentary power of the subconscious, he is the narrator walking aimlessly where suddenly ‘every step I take turns the street upside-down into a circus'. At first he ‘could soar with joy', but when the spectacle is repeated over and over from street to street, “I long in my soul to go back to my home… and trust that soon my relief will arrive'. He opens his door and finds — ‘the clown there to greet me, giggling'.[3] No escape from the world and the writer's innate compulsion to dredge from its confusion, meaning.

Nadine Gordimer

Select bibliography

This bibliography is confined to works available in English.

MEHAHEM MILSON, Naguib Matifouz: The Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo, St Martin Press, New York, 1998.

RASHEED EL-ENANY,Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning, Routledge, London and New York, 1993.

MICHAEL BEARD and ADNAN HAYDAR, eds, Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1993.

TREVOR LE GASSICK, ed., Critical Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz, Three Continents Press, Washington DC, 1991.

HAIM GORDON,Naguib Mahfouz's Egypt: Existential Themes in his Writings, Greenwood Press, New York, 1990.

M. M. ENANi, ed., Egyptian Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz: A Collection of Critical Essays, General Egyptian Book Organization, Cairo, 1989.

MATTITYAHU PELED,Religion My Own: The Literary Works of Najib Mah- fuz, Transaction Books, New Brunswick, 1983.

SASSON SOMEKH,The Changing Rhythm: A Study of Najib Mahfuz's Novels, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1973.

E. M. FORSTER,Alexandria: A History and a Guide, Whitehead Morris Limited, Alexandria, 1922.

MATTi MOOSA, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, Three Continents Press, Washington, DC, 1983.

ALI B. JAD,Form and Technique in the Egyptian Novel fgis-igyi), Ithaca Press, London, 1983.

ROGER ALLEN,The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1982.

HILARY KILPATRICK, The Modern Egyptian Novel: A Study in Social Criticism, Ithaca Press, London, 1974.

HAMDI SAKKUT,The Egyptian Novel and its Main Trends (1913–1952), The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, 1971. j. BRUGMAN,An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1984.

CHARLES D. SMITH,Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt: A Biography of Muhammad Husayn Haykal, State University of New York, Albany, 1983.

MARINA STAGH,The Limits of Freedom of Speech: Prose Literature and Prose Writers in Egypt under Nasser and Sadat, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm, 1994.

H. A. R. GIBB,Arabic Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1963. ALBERT HOURANi, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962. p. j. VATiKiOTis, The History of Egypt, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985.

Map of Ancient Egypt

Khufu's Wisdom

A Novel of Ancient Egypt

Translated by Raymond Stock