I picked this one up at Cherry Valley Bookstore, a cool little shop with a really excellent selection of high quality used books. Mahfouz is one of the authors in my personal pantheon, that is, one of the authors whose works I am trying to read all of. He's an especially fascinating one, because there are observable changes in his style over the long arc of his career, from more typical realist-style fare (though with a goodly dose of symbolism) to more formally experimental (which I prefer, I think). He writes a lot of bitter, angry male protagonists, which I initially found abrasive, but now have grown accustomed to, I guess.
Anyways, this one was especially interesting, because it's set in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1952, and chronicles the story of a man who is on the outs with the new regime. I am not especially knowledgeable about Egyptian history and politics, but I was really struck by the way this novel captures a sense of frustration, confusion, and malaise connected to massive political changes, and I kept thinking of it in relation to US politics of the last 10 years or so. The thing about political upheaval is that life goes on, in many ways, unchanged, but then it also doesn't. Your individual life is deeply shaped by those various forces and happenings, but there are also aspects of it that seem entirely separate (even if they aren't). There was something about the way this story see-sawed between broader social concerns and deeply selfish individual ones that was really compelling to me. And is curiously echoed in the way that I, in turn, read it as both a particular account of a specific time and place (one I know very little about — but I was dimly aware of the ways that the novel was referencing its particular moment) — and a more universal, or at least transportable, story that resonated with my own time.
No comments:
Post a Comment