|
|
English edition
Mar
2009
392 pp.
Hardbound
15X23 cm
$22.95
LE 90.00
ISBN
978 977 416 265 7
For sale worldwide
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Mirage
|
E-mail to a friend
Print
|
Naguib Mahfouz
Translated by
Nancy Roberts
The Nobel laureate’s masterful study of a disturbed man’s struggle with the realities of life
A psychological study of the first order with a subtly Freudian flavor, The Mirage is the autobiographical account of Kamil Ru’ba, a tortured soul who finds himself struggling unduly to cope with life’s challenges. The internal torment and angst that dog him throughout his life and the tragic, ironic turns of events that overtake him as a young man are, to a great extent, the outworkings of his faulty upbringing. At the same time, they work together to drive home the novel’s underlying theme: the illusory, undependable nature of the world in which we live and the call to seek, beyond the outward and the ephemeral, that which is inward and enduring. The narrative, full of pathos, draws the reader unwittingly into a vicarious experience of Kamil’s agonies and ecstasies. As such, it is a specimen of Mahfouz’s prose at its finest.
Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) was born in the crowded Cairo district of Gamaliya. He wrote nearly 40 novel-length works, plus hundreds of short stories and numerous screenplays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.
Nancy Roberts is the translator of Salwa Bakr’s The Man from Bashmour (AUC Press, 2007) for which she received a commendation in the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Translation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
