| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780385485562 | | Publisher: Anchor Books | | Publish Date: 1/1/1998 | | Buy.com Sku: 30055638 | | Item#: RTHRD7 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.25L x 0.5T |
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| | | From the Foreword by Nadine Gordimer: "These pieces are meditations which echo that which was, has been, and is the writer Mahfouz. They are--in the words of the title of one of the prose pieces--'The Dialogue of the Late Afternoon' of his life. I don't believe any autobiography, with its inevitable implication of self-presentation, could have matched what we have here."
With more than 500,000 copies of his books in print, Naguib Mahfouz has established a following of readers for whom "Echoes of an Autobiography provides a unique opportunity to catch an intimate glimpse into the life and mind of this magnificent storyteller. Here, in his first work of nonfiction ever to be published in the United States, Mahfouz considers the myriad perplexities of existence, including preoccupations with old age, death, and life's transitory nature. A surprising and delightful departure from his bestselling and much-loved fiction, this unusual and thoughtful book is breathtaking evidence of the fact that Naguib Mahfouz is not only a "storyteller of the first order" ("Vanity Fair), but also a profound thinker of the first order.
Annotation:
Readers of Mahfouz's fiction will find many of the same themes that run through his fiction in this autobiography--his preoccupation with old age, death and life's transitory moments--all treated with his characteristic wry good humor. Also of special interest is a number of passages that he devotes to the aphoristic sayings of the traditional Sufi masters, a contribution to the literature of Islam that has had a profound influence on his own writing.
| PraiseKirkus
"Americans accustomed to the histrionic self-display of celebrity memoirs...are likely to find the Nobel laureate Mahfouz's fragmentary approach to autobiography charmingly novel....[T]he novelist offers a haunting commonplace book of tranquil wisdom." 11/01/1996Forword
"I is impossible to read this work without gaining illumination through a quality that has come to be regarded as a quaint anachronism in modern existence...I pronounce it with hesitation: wisdom." - Nadine Gordimer Economist
"'Echoes of an Autobiography' is something of a surprise: not so much a record of a long life (Mr Mahfouz is now 85) as a collection of allusions and aphorisms. The
obvious comparison is with the mystic musing of Lebanon's Kahlil Gibran, the first Arab writer to gain western fame, rather than the gritty realism that runs through 'The Cairo Trilogy' and other Mahfouz best sellers. Look a little deeper, however, and what emerges is the familiar Mahfouz obsession with humanity's foibles." 03/15/1997 |
| Author Bio| Naguib Mahfouz | | Mahfouz is probably the best-known Arabic writer of the 20th century. He studied philosophy at Cairo University, graduating in 1934. Since then, he has been writing novels and short stories, many of them about the Cairo neighborhood he knows intimately. Mahfouz was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature, and was the first writer of Arabic descent to do so. Many of his works have been banned or are unavailable in Islamic nations of the Middle East because of his criticism of the regime in Egypt after the overthrow of King Farouk in 1952. |
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