I am very late with this review because I felt so bad about what I was going to say. Who was I to say negative things about this work by a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature?! Oh dear!

I really didn’t like this book. I couldn’t understand this because I’ve read and enjoyed Mahfouz’s books in the past. The answer is in the introduction (pp. XXIV-XXVI), which I initially skipped. Here Mahfouz adopted a new writing style that basically eliminated all of the atmosphere that made his earlier works so alluring. Instead, the reader is unceremoniously dumped right into the story. This is not the least bit gratifying for the reader. Truth be told, I couldn’t even finish this book (and that is a very rare phenomenon).

This slim volume contains a translation of the author's Nobel acceptance speech and four handwritten (in Arabic) stories. Most of the book's very short stories read like fables, albeit often without a clear moral.

So: a treasure for the Naguib Mahfouz completist. Food (appetizers) for thought for the rest of us. Did it leave me hungry for more? I have to think about it. (But will I?)

This is a post-humous collection of stories by Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz. Placed in the twentieth century, these slice of life stories occur in a quarter of Cairo. Excellently done, these stories provide a glimpse into a lifestyle very different from that of most western readers.

I think it is more likely that readers who have read Mahfouz's novels will appreciate these short stories more than readers who have not. Mahfouz is known for his ability to immerse the reader in the life and lives in Cairo with his incredible characters and evocative prose. These stories seem like character sketches. Apparently they were found among the author's belongings after his death. I think they were not intended to be published, yet nonetheless they convey the mindset of life in "the quarter", the secrecy, the superstition, and the intrigue. A fantastic bonus is that Mahfouz' s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature is included with the stories. Such a gifted man and eloquent representative of his culture! ( )

Naguib Mahfouz was the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and no other Arabic writer has been awarded the Nobel Prize since Mahfouz received it in 1988. (Orhan Pamuk, winner in 2006, wrote in Turkish which is not the same as Arabic.) Given how many Arabic speakers there are in the world (420 million) you would think that there would have been somebody else deserving of the award. French writing laureates number 14 as do German writing winners and those languages are spoken by only one-quarter of the number that speak Arabic. It's not news that the selection for Nobel Literature laureates is manifestly skewed towards white, male Europeans but it does make an interesting backdrop to this book.

Mahfouz died in 2006 but this collection of stories was only found recently. They were labellled with a piece of paper saying "For publishin 1994". It's not surprising that they were not published then as Mahfouz was attacked and wounded severely in 1994 as a result of a fatwa issued by a Muslim cleric because Mahfouz supported Salman Rushdie's right to publish after a fatwa was issued against him for writing The Satanic Verses. After reading these stories I wonder if Mahfouz was quite finished his editing of them as some seem clunky and uneven. Or perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood to read these.

I did like the story entitled "Tawhida" which is about a young girl who married into the narrator's family and charmed everyone. The narrator seems to have been smitten by her but lost track of her for years. Then one day when he is old a car pulls up in front of him with an old woman as a passenger and she waves to him. He doesn't recognize her. "She had a face that might be an icon to old age: gaunt, pale, thin, and wrinkled. She was wearing dark glasses." But as soon as he heard her voice "the past came rushing back like a perfume bottle smashing to the ground." Such lovely imagery!

I have read Mahfouz's more famous book, Midaq Alley, which I enjoyed ver much. So I hope this little book will please some reader. ( )