The Time and the Place and Other Stories

by Naguib Mahfouz

Book Overview

Selected and translated by the distinguished scholar Denys Johnson-Daivies, these stories have all the celebrated and distinctive characters and qualities found in Mahfouz's novels: The denizens of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385264720
• ISBN13: 9780385264723
• Release Date: June 1992
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

The many faces of old Cairo

Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz was the great chronicler of Cairo's dark alleyways and murky souls. Born in 1911, he was educated in philosophy at the University of Cairo and spent most of his life as a civil servant . While he seldom travelled abroad, he was strongly inlfuenced by the likes of men like Proust, Balzac, Dickens, and Camus. He won the Nobel Prize in 1988."The Time and the Place and Other Stories" is a great place to begin if you've never read anything by Mahfouz and a welcome slice of his short fiction if you're only familiar with his novels. One is struck by the variety of the stories collected here. Written between 1962 and 1989, they incapsulate Mahfouz's concern with everything from political injustice to the downfall of families to loneliness and death and the anguished world-weariness that merges gradually, in many characters, into mysticism.The Borgesean "The Man and the Other Man" (even the title is Borgesean) is a dark political allegory about a murderer stalking his victim; at the end, though, he finds himself woven into a labyrinthine nightmare of his own creation. In contrast to this tale's surrealism, "The Answer is No" is a realistic, outspokenly "feminist" tale about a resolute young woman who scorns the advances of an old tutor of hers and seeks to avoid love in order to devote her life to teaching, "persuading herself that happiness is not confined to love and motherhood. Never has she regretted her firm decision." Side by side with these are stories like the title-piece, a semi-fantastic tale about a man who digs up an ancient parchment in his garden which leads him, in a bizarre (but, in retrospect, hilarious) ending, into trouble with the law, and "The Empty Café", about an old teacher "cursed by a long life" who has seen all his friends and now his wife die and is left, at last, alone, shipwrecked at the end of his days in an age that is not his. Alongside these are the folktale-ish "The Conjurer Made Off With the Dish" and the mystical "Zaabalawi", Mahfouz's most famous story, about a man hunting for an elusive healer-sheikh.I thought a few of the stories were a flop (for instance, "The Tavern of the Black Cat", in which a man walks into a café and, for no reason I could catch, refuses to let anyone leave; the jumbled up ending left me with the impression that Mahfouz just couldn't pull it off.) Otherwise, there's no reason why this book should be out of print. It's worth finding. 5 stars.