Middle Eastern Fiction, African Fiction, Middle Eastern Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature

The Search

Name: The Search
Author: Naguib Mahfouz
ISBN: 9780385264600

by Naguib Mahfouz

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Overview

A powerful story of lust, greed and murder. Unflinching, tough, and dramatic, The Search was most certainly intended to be a harsh criticism of Post-Revolution morality, but, on its most elemental level, it is a lurid and compelling tale.

Naguib Mahfouz is Egypt's most famous novelist and is considered to be an author of international importance. In The Search, a young man, hoping to escape a sordid background sets out to find the father he has never known.

About the Author, Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, his works range from reimaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. Over a career that lasted more than five decades, he wrote 33 novels, 13 short story anthologies, numerous plays, and 30 screenplays. Of his many works, most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations, from 1917 until 1952. In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in Arabic to do so. He died in August 2006.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A lesser effort by Nobel laureate Mahfouz (the Cairo Trilogy), this 1964 novel is an indictment of what the author sees as the erosion of morality in post-revolution Egypt. The imprisonment and financial ruin of Basima, a prostitute, lead to her premature demise. Her spoiled son, Saber, a good-for-nothing playboy, is now in a pickle (``I must either work or kill''), so he follows his mother's deathbed instructions and searches for the father he thought was deceased, hoping to leech onto him and thus maintain the high standard of living to which he has grown accustomed. He moves from Alexandria to Cairo, where he advertises in the newspaper for his father who continually eludes him, and leads a duplicitous existence with two women. Gentle, naive Elham, a clerk at the newspaper's ad office, falls in love with Saber. But Saber, in turn, lusts for Karima, a manipulative woman married to Saber's landlord, who is many years her senior. Karima perfectly fits the whore's son's picture of the opposite sex: ``They were beautiful, savage beings looking for love and passion, without principles or scruples.'' With overwrought plot and prose, Mahfouz delineates Saber and Karima's obviously doomed scheme to murder the landlord, take the money and run. (June)