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Mar 27, 2007 | ISBN 9780307266248 Buy
Nov 26, 2008 | ISBN 9780307491886 Buy
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Available from:
Mar 27, 2007 | ISBN 9780307266248
Nov 26, 2008 | ISBN 9780307491886
From Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz: the three magnificent novels—published in an omnibus edition for the first time—that form an ancient-Egyptian counterpart to his famous Cairo Trilogy.
Mahfouz reaches back thousands of years to bring us tales from his homeland’s majestic early history—tales of the Egyptian nobility and of war, star-crossed love, and the divine rule of the pharoahs. In Khufu’s Wisdom, the legendary Fourth Dynasty monarch faces the prospect of the end of his rule and the possibility that his daughter has fallen in love with the man prophesied to be his successor. Rhadopis of Nubia is the unforgettable story of the charismatic young Pharoah Merenra II and the ravishing courtesan Rhadopis, whose love affair makes them the envy of all Egyptian society. And Thebes at War tells the epic story of Egypt’s victory over the Asiatic foreigners who dominated the country for two centuries.
Three Novels of Ancient Egypt gives us a dazzling tapestry of ancient Egypt and reminds us of the remarkable artistry of Naguib Mahfouz.
Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. His nearly forty novels and hundreds of short stories range from re-imaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. Of his… More about Naguib Mahfouz
“Mahfouz’s characters blaze with intensity, his Egypt pulsates with unresolved tensions.” —THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION“Mahfouz’s understanding of human psychology and history is profound.” —THE BOSTON GLOBE“He is not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romains.” —Edward Said, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS“Mahfouz is the single most important writer in modern Arabic literature.” —NEWSDAY“A storyteller of the first order in any idiom.” —VANITY FAIR“Through works rich in nuance—now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous—Mahfouz has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.” —The Swedish Academy, upon awarding Mahfouz the Nobel Prize in Literature
INTRODUCTIONby Nadine Gordimer‘What matters in the historical novel is not the telling of great historical events, but the poet’s awakening of people who figure in those events. What matters is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical realities.’*Naguib Mahfouz adds another dimension to what matters. Reading back through his work written over seventy-six years and coming to this trilogy of earliest published novels brings the relevance of re-experience of Pharaonic times to our own. The historical novel is not a mummy brought to light; in Mahfouz’s hands it is alive in ourselves, our twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, in the complex motivations with which we tackle the undreamt-of transformation of means and accompanying aleatory forces let loose upon us. Although these three fictions were written before the Second World War, before the atom bomb, there is a prescience–in the characters, not authorial statement–of what was to come. A prescience that the writer was going to explore in relation to the historical periods he himself would live through, in the forty novels which followed.*Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Merlin Press, 1962.
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