Word: mahfouz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After the huge success in 2002 of his first novel, The Yacoubian Building - another scathing examination of Egypt's malaise - Al Aswany is already drawing comparisons to the nation's Nobel literature laureate, Naguib Mahfouz. Such high praise may be a little premature: Mahfouz founded modern Arabic literature and wrote almost 50 novels over half a century. But Al Aswany - who continues to work on the side as a dentist in Cairo - does share the legendary author's talent for constructing simple stories about Egyptian life that convey universal truths in defense of human dignity. His writing tackles the most...
...Aswany acknowledges a literary debt to Mahfouz, in more ways than one. During a crisis of confidence in his 20s, he ran into Mahfouz at a hotel in Alexandria and received a three-hour pep talk from the master. Rejecting the Arab vogue for postmodernism, Al Aswany has stayed true to the Mahfouz tradition of social realism. And like Mahfouz, he has a gift for writing literary page turners that are endlessly discussed by café intellectuals while also being accessible to Egyptians who normally have more time for Al-Ahly, their favorite football team. "He is read everywhere," says...
...Cairo's Spinner of Tales The Arab world's most prominent literary figure, Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, died last month at age 94. TIME profiled the author in 1988 after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature...
...nearly 40 novels and a dozen story collections, [Mahfouz] has dealt with the social and political upheavals Egypt has experienced during his lifetime. His main contribution, says Sasson Somekh, a visiting professor of Arabic literature at Princeton, is the 'creation of a new Egyptian style' that combines the narrative manner of classic texts such as The Thousand and One Nights with contemporary subject matter ... Retired in 1971 from his post as an adviser to the Minister of Culture, he spends most of his time in cafés, drinking coffee and exchanging gossip. HE IS ALSO KNOWN...
...Naguib Mahfouz, who died last week at 94, transcended the status of celebrated writer and became Egypt's spiritual father. The characters from his books were the vocabulary of everyday life. It is common to hear an Egyptian woman, quarrelling with her husband, shout in his face, "You think you're Si Sayed?"?a reference to the tyrannical husband in Mahfouz's landmark Cairo Trilogy. He laid the foundations of the modern Arab novel and proved that a great artist?he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988?must also be a great human being. Thousands of Cairo...