The Dreams
by Naguib Mahfouz
On This Page
Description
In this collection of his newest and shortest short stories, the Egyptian Nobel literature laureate has reduced the fictional form to its most essential level, while retaining his justifiably famous mastery of the storytelling art. A man finds that all the streets in his neighborhood have turned into a circus - but his joy at the sight changes to anger when he discovers he cannot escape it anywhere, even in his own home. A group of lifelong friends meet to trade jokes in a familiar alley - show more only to face a sudden, deadly flood that echoes the revenge taken by an ancient Egyptian queen upon the men who murdered her husband. A girl from the dreamer's childhood flies with him from his native lane on a cart drawn by a winged horse, to become a star in the firmament above the Great Pyramid. Such is the stuff of Naguib Mahfouz's The Dreams - his first major work since a knife attack by a religious fanatic in 1994 left him unable to write for several years. First serialized in a Cairo magazine, The Dreams are a unique and haunting mixture of the deceptively quotidian, the seductively lyrical, and the savagely nightmarish - the richly condensed sum of more than nine decades of artistic genius and everyday experience. - Dust jacket. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Made me think of Kafka's vignettes, although Kafka's little storyless stories are always nightmares somehow, or else gnomic parables rather than real dreams. These are truly reportorial of the night-state, like a journal of the subconscious (and collective unconscious). They are hauntingly beautiful and sad. They are the only Mahfouz I've read so far; not representative I'm sure but worth it just for what they show a master can do with the rawest of material.
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Lists
Books Read in 2024
4,623 works; 126 members
Author Information
330+ Works 19,100 Members
Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo, Egypt on December 11, 1911. He received a degree in philosophy from the University of Cairo. He took on several civil service and government department jobs to supplement his income while writing, but retired from that career in 1971. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 30 novels including The Games of Fate, show more The Cairo Trilogy, Children of Gebelawi, The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail, Small Talk on the Nile, and Miramar. He received numerous awards including the Egyptian State Prize, the Presidential Medal from the American University in Cairo, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He died as a result of a head injury on August 30, 2006 at the age of 94. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 892.7 — Literature & rhetoric Literatures of other languages Afro-Asiatic literatures Arabic (Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan)
- LCC
- PJ7846 .A46 — Language and Literature Oriental languages and literatures Oriental philology and literature Arabic Arabic literature Individual authors or works
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 100
- Popularity
- 322,656
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.85)
- Languages
- 5 — Arabic, English, French, German, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 10
- ASINs
- 1
