Sad, strange, comic (often all at once), these mosaic shards build into an elusive pattern… Something in them resists translation from night into day, just as Diana Matar’s intriguingly shaded, cropped and angled photos tempt us with the promise of a narrative—and deny it. We learn that private experience, asleep or awake, will always escape its interpretations. Both words and images guard their mystery.
— Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times
Confirms again the richness and variety of Mahfouz’s storytelling—“the single most important writer in modern Arabic literature” (Newsweek)
In his final years, the Egyptian master storyteller and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These last dreams, stunning poetic vignettes—now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the acclaimed writer Hisham Matar—appear here with dreamlike photographs by the famous American photographer Diana Matar, which both mysteriously rhyme with Mahfouz’s nocturnal reveries and, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn, opening up the texts. These sketches and stories are tersely haunting miniatures. Recurring female characters may embody Cairo herself, especially one much-missed lover from Mahfouz’s youth. Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many beautiful women all float through these affecting, brief tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in slumber. A tender, personal introduction by Hisham Matar, recollecting how he and his wife met Mahfouz in Cairo not long after the assassination attempt on the author, is moving and likewise indelible.
Sad, strange, comic (often all at once), these mosaic shards build into an elusive pattern… Something in them resists translation from night into day, just as Diana Matar’s intriguingly shaded, cropped and angled photos tempt us with the promise of a narrative—and deny it. We learn that private experience, asleep or awake, will always escape its interpretations. Both words and images guard their mystery.
— Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times
Poetry and mystery in brief, enigmatic bursts. Nearly 100 years old, his writerly stamina significantly curtailed following an assassination attempt, Mahfouz turned toward his own subconscious… As suggested in the introduction by Hisham Matar and underscored by evocative photographs by Diana Matar, the more constant presence throughout this book may be the city of Cairo.
— Brendan Driscoll, Booklist
A vision that aspires to a sort of all-encompassing view not unlike Dante’s in its twinning of earthly actuality with the eternal.
— Edward Said, The New York Review of Books
Mahfouz’s work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical.
— The Los Angeles Times
The Arab world’s foremost novelist.
— The New York Times
Egypt’s greatest living writer and one of the world’s most humane literary figures.
— Laila Lalami, The Nation
Elegant, often haunting evocations of a lost world at the end of life.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Not many writers can pull off an accomplished book of dreams. Thankfully, Naguib Mahfouz is one who absolutely can. Some of these stories have an allegorical quality to them; others play out like fables or quietly growing revelations.
— Words Without Borders
The noirish pictures of Diana Matar heighten the book’s intimacy with scenes of daily life in modern-day Cairo. Together with Mahfouz’s warm voice and subconscious visions, the effect is one of compassion and a wise understanding of life’s difficulties. I was swayed to lose myself in their bittersweet zones, as if I were not reading, but lucid dreaming.
— Asymptote
In a collage of fragmented scenes depicting missed connections, thwarted love, and family drama, Mahfouz contends with his 'aging self,' imagines himself a soccer star, and returns to his childhood homes.
— Shahina Piyarali, Shelf Awareness
Between Mahfouz’s exploration, in old age, of his own self after trauma, Diana Matar’s shadow-drenched images of fleeting moments in Cairo, and Hisham Matar’s fluent translation from Arabic to English, this is a thrilling book.
