“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.”
Editorial Reviews
Review
“”The Arab world’s foremost novelist.””
― The New York Times
“”Mahfouz’s work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical.””
― The Los Angeles Times
“”A towering literary figure.””
― The Economist
“”A master of both detailed realism and fabulous storytelling.””
― The Guardian
“”Mahfouz is a storyteller of the first order in any idiom.””
― Vanity Fair
“”Mahfouz’s work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical. The Nobel Prize acknowledges the universal significance of his fiction.””
― Los Angeles Times Book Review
“”The incredible variety of Naguib Mahfouz’s writings continues to dazzle our eyes.””
― The Washington Post
“A dream journal kept by Egyptian Nobel laureate Mahfouz in the last years of his life reveals poetry and mystery in brief, enigmatic bursts… As suggested in the introduction by Hisham Matar and underscored by evocative photographs by Diana Matar, the more constant presence throughout this book may be the city of Cairo.”
― Brendan Driscoll, Booklist
“Sad, strange, comic (often all at once), these mosaic shards build into an elusive pattern… Something in them resists translation from night into day, just as Diana Matar’s intriguingly shaded, cropped and angled photos tempt us with the promise of a narrative ― and deny it. We learn that private experience, asleep or awake, will always escape its interpretations. Both words and images guard their mystery.”
― Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times
“Elegant, often haunting evocations of a lost world at the end of life.”
― Kirkus (starred review) –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
