#721 A Day for Saying Goodbye- Naguib Mahfouz

#721 A Day for Saying Goodbye- Naguib Mahfouz

Mustafa Ibrahim is forty-five, with two grown children and wife. He his profoundly unhappy. His marriage is beyond joyless, it has become unbearable. They both know this, but the anger flows and it cannot be stopped. The children were put in the middle and that is what he regrets the most.

“How greatly we harmed them. The love between us had suffered hour by hour and day by day till it breathed its last. It had been choked in the hubbub of continuing arguments, quarrels and exchanges of abuse.”

Life was a battle, and:  “Vengeance became mingled with the cost of living.”

He has done a desperate act and ponders doing another. As he walks the city during the day, he says goodbye to people he knows and the sites of his home city. Soon, one way or another, he will be leaving this world.

I absolutely love this style of writing. Mahfouz’ purpose of language and delicate character development is unparalleled. The plot isn’t spelled out, nor is it unraveled. It just appears at the exact right pace like seeing a landscape come into view while riding in a  car.

Notable Passage: “If the inclination of the inner self were to assume concrete form, crimes and actions of heroism would be rife.”

Rating: 9-8-8-9 Total= 34

#679 The Empty Café- Naguib Mahfouz

#679 The Empty Café- Naguib Mahfouz

Mohammed Rasheedi’s wife has just died after forty years of being married to each other. He was much older than she was, but he has outlived her. He has in fact, outlived all of his friends too; he is the last one left. His son and daughter-in-law have happily welcomed him into their house to live, but he does not feel at home. He is lonely and out of sorts.

It is obvious that he does not want to be a burden on his family, and he does not want to impose on their day to day lives. He feels a kinship with the household cat, but that too does not belong to him. What does he have left but fading memories and days alone sitting at the café forgetting to drink his coffee?

This isn’t exactly sad, but it is melancholy and very delicate.

Rating: 9-7-7-7 Total= 30

#651 The Lawsuit- Naguib Mahfouz

#651 The Lawsuit- Naguib Mahfouz

Money can tear a family apart, it can cause jealousy, hatred, and ruin. If you make your life about getting and keeping wealth, when its gone what else do you have? A man takes a second wife; his family worries that she will take all their inheritance. They fret and complain but the woman stays. The rift and jealousy causes the eldest son to be arrested and die, the mother and father also die. 

As they feared the young wife has taken all their father’s money. The youngest son, the narrator, has been the most level headed about the situation and has always taken care of himself. Now years later someone has robbed the young wife of the money she had stolen. Broke, and destitute she sues the son for more money.

Rating: 7-6-7-7 Total= 27

#623 The Tavern of the Black Cat- Naguib Mahfouz

#623 The Tavern of the Black Cat- Naguib Mahfouz

“They were engaged in a sing-song when a stranger appeared at the door.”

This is a nice allegory taking place in a bar. Who doesn’t know the comfort, friendliness, camaraderie and familiarity or a good neighborhood bar:

“The Taverns patrons were one big family tree whose branches were spread among the bare wooden tables. Some of them were bound by ties of friendship or by being colleagues at work, while all were joined in the brotherhood of being together in the same place and in the spiritual intimacy they shared there night after night. They were united too by conversation and the infernal wine.”

As the stranger’s ominous presence disrupts the nightly reverie, it appears that he is deranged and dangerous. After several cups of the infernal wine, and many tense moments of muttering to himself, the man speaks to the room and announces that nobody is allowed to leave until he says so. Angry and scared at first, the patrons soon realize that they normally don’t eave for many hours, so might as well have fun. Fate is sitting their waiting regardless. What will you do, live in fear, or live like it isn’t even there?

Notable Passage: “Who of you is without a story…?”

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29

#595 The Ditch- Naguib Mahfouz

#595 The Ditch- Naguib Mahfouz

An old man and the building he lives in are falling apart and not long for this world. He laments the too rapid passing of time and remembers the life that once existed inside these walls:

“In my childhood days, the house was of mature age and in fair shape, and the alley, paved with stones and with two sidewalks…”

Now:

“The shadow of times long past, the expectation of the house collapsing, and the diffusion of filth all pervading my feelings and gave me a sensation of disease—and of fear as well.”

He knows he cannot avoid the inevitable, but wishes for something, a memory, more time, acknowledgement, something. He visits his family's burial plot and takes stock of the past and of the future.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#559 Blessed Night- Naguib Mahfouz

#559 Blessed Night- Naguib Mahfouz

“Yesterday,” said the bartender, “I dreamed that a gift would be presented  to a man of good fortune.”

That is the proclamation that Safwan heard at the bar before departing for home. Only he never found his home. Drunk and confused he stood before an empty lot that was once his house and his family. He was taken in by the police for being drunk and disorderly before being pitied and sent back to his address. This time, there was a house there, but still not his.

There is a crazy series of events that are confusing to both the drunken Safwan and to the reader. It appears that he had made an unwitting deal, a deal of a lifetime, to exchange his family, home, and his life for what was in a suitcase: “In this suitcase is all that a happy man needs in this world.”

I wonder what it is?

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#532 The Time and the Place- Naguib Mahfouz

#532 The Time and the Place- Naguib Mahfouz

A man is in state of transition, physically, spiritually, symbolically. These are the “days of insecurity” and as he is about to leave his home, he has a crisis of conscience.

“All at once I felt that I was being required to do something, something from which there was no escape.”

“For no reason a listlessness gripped at my feeling of well-being, after which I was overcome by a mysterious sense of unease. I steeled myself to fight against it, but the whole of life piled up before my eyes in a fleeting flash, like a ball of light flung forward with cosmic speed; in no time it was extinguished, giving itself up to the unknown, submerged in its endless depths.”

He has dreams and he is unsure whether they are real occurrences or prophetic visions. His soul is struggling in a waking limbo of uncertainty. But he is being lifted by this experience.

“My imagination went roaming through the vastness of time that comprised past, present, and future together, drunk with the intoxication that total freedom brings.”

This is such a rich and fulfilling style of prose. It amazes me that even in translation and separated by age and culture, that these stories can still exude such emotion. I cant imagine what it must have been like to first read this in it’s original language.

Notable Passage: “My heart became filled with the delights and pains of living in expectation.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#497 The Answer is No- Naguib Mahfouz

#497 The Answer is No- Naguib Mahfouz

Badran Badawi had taken advantage of his fourteen year old student and made no big deal about it. In fact he thought it normal since he planned on asking for her hand in marriage when she became of a proper age. By that time her father had died and she was mature and indipendant.

“By then she had attained a degree of maturity that gave her an understanding of the dimensions of her tragic position. She had found that she had no love or respect for him and that he was as far a she could be from her dreams and from the ideas she had formed of what constituted an ideal and moral person…to have abused her innocence was one thing, but for him to have the upper hand now that she was fully in possession of her faculties was something else.”

So, for those reasons and many more, the answer was no, consequences be damned.

Rating: 7-7-8-8 Total= 30

#476 The Conjurer Made Off With the Dish- Naguib Mahfouz

#476 The Conjurer Made Off With the Dish- Naguib Mahfouz

A daydreaming child is old enough to run errands for his mother, but doesn’t have the concentration level to carry out the simple task of going to get some beans from the market. Three times he must return home to be told the details about what to get. When he finally gets the order right, he has lost the money, then he loses the dish, then he gets waylaid by a conjurer's show, then a beautiful girl catches his eye.

Since he will certainly catch a beating when he gets home, might as well stay out to chase the day’s adventures. Oh, to be a daydreaming child again.

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total=29

#455 Zaabalawi- Naguib Mahfouz

#455 Zaabalawi- Naguib Mahfouz

A man is afflicted and in need of help. He remembers his recently deceased father speaking glowingly about the great Sheikh, Zaabalawi. He saved his father and now he strikes out to find him, so he too can be saved. But where to look?

“He was once upon a time. A real man of mystery: he’d visit you so often that people would imagine he was your nearest and dearest, then would disappear as though he’d never existed. Yet saints are not to be blamed.”

He visits any place he has heard rumors of Zaabalawi’s presence, but he is greeted with the same answers each place he goes. They say that Zaabalawi was here, but he has left, and they don’t know where. Zaabalawi has touched the lives of so many people, talked of in mostly hallowed terms, and even when he was thought a charlatan, they still remembered him. But he still cannot find him

Zaabalawi is a metaphor for faith. He is elusive and hard to describe. Those that have experienced it talk glowingly about it, but they cannot show you where to find it, it must be found by each person in their own way. In searching, one might find many other valuable things.

Rating: 8-8-9-9 Total= 34

#5 Room 12- Naguib Mahfouz

#5 Room #12 (2005) –Naguib Mahfouz

Mafouz is an Egyptian author that won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.  This is my first time reading his work. 

Room #12 is a comedic work that takes place in a hotel.  A mysterious, eccentric woman checks in and is immediately the target of wild imaginations by the hotel staff.  The intrigue multiplies by large magnitudes as parades of visitors pile into her room throughout her stay.

“Mad depravity is running wild in there”

She is visited by all manner of folk, all being allowed admittance except an increasingly frustrated “Corpse Washer” named Sayid.   As the staff’s mood turns from curiosity to worry to anger, rain literally comes down on their heads as leaks form in ceilings throughout their charge.  Exasperation reigns supreme:

“This hotel is no longer a hotel, and I’m no longer the manager, and today is not a day and lunacy is laughing at us in the shape of meat and wine!”

As the mundane but pressing responsibilities of their jobs outweigh the distracting imaginings in Room #12, the tension washes away.  Remember, what happens in somebody else’s hotel room is none of your damn business…so why let it anger you?

Notable Passage: “Cosmic ire was smiting the night outside”

Rating: 8-9-8-8 Total =33