we use must use it wisely. In “Half a Day” by Naguib Mahfouz, he shows the reader that you must live life because it will quickly pass you by. He demonstrates this by having the character experience new things, time passing quickly, and showing evolution. When the young boy doesn't want to go to school, he is forced to experience something new. As he approaches the new school he is attending his father tells him “Today you truly begin life.”(Mahfouz 85). The significance of this quote is that the
In the novel Fountain and Tomb by Naguib Mahfouz, the reader is thrown into a small alley in Cairo, Egypt in the 1920s. The narrator is an adult reliving his childhood through many random, interesting vignettes of his youth. We learn about many different aspects of Egyptian life from political rebellion, to arranged marriages, to religious devotion, to gang warfare. We are led to conclude that one of the major themes of the book is Truth. We come to question whether Truth is something that always
Conflicting Depictions of Female Characters in Mahfouz’s 1966 Novel Adrift on the Nile and Hussein Kamal’s 1971 Film Adaptation Upon reading Naguib Mahfouz’s Adrift on the Nile, and viewing the film of the same title released in 1972, one will undoubtedly notice the stark contrast between the portrayals of women in each of these works. Critics like Ibrahim El- Sheikh and Pamela Allegretto–Diiulio have argued that by realistically depicting the social condition of Egyptian women, Mahfouz’s
Fountain and Tomb Naguib Mahfouz’s 1988 novel Fountain and Tomb tells a series of stories centered on love, humanity, politics, and death in 1920 Egypt. The format of this novel is unconventional relative to any literature I’ve read before. The novel frequently shifts to various tales about the narrator’s community from different periods of the narrator’s life, while maintaining the first-person framework. Mahfouz heavily invokes literary techniques such as indirect characterization and indirect
Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz is a story of love, ambition, hope, and their corruptions. Through each member of the alley each of these ideas are explored, and a truth is revealed about the meanings of these emotions and how they impact the way humans interact with one another. The stories of Midaq Alley are each individual, but they come together to weave a bigger picture, a reflection on both Western and Traditional Egyptian and Arab culture. Through the character of Hamida, a foster daughter,
Naguib Mahfouz was a prestigious Egyptian writer, who wrote several notable novels, such as “Midaq Alley” (1947) and “The Cairo Trilogy”. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. (Nobelprize.org, “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1988”). Midaq Alley is set 1940s' Egypt, during World War II, while Egypt was still a monarchy, and under British occupation. Mahfouz's characters are often symbolic. In Midaq Alley, Hamida, the protagonist symbolizes Egypt. Hamida is Egypt due to her rebellious nature
specific beliefs, or the choices they make can give a deep insight into someone’s culture. I feel that culture, in one way or another, is clearly presented in “On Crime and Punishment” by Khalil Gibran as well as “The Journey of Ibn Fattouma”, by Naguib Mahfouz. “On Crime and Punishment” by Khalil Gibran discusses how crimes are committed, but there is almost always more to the story. Even though this is Arabic literature, I feel that this applies to many cultures. In most cultures, including mine
Cairo Modern is a novel published by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib in 1945, though it depicts Cairo in the 1930s. This was a turbulent period in Egyptian history, as the end of the first world war brought about a gradual end to English imperialism, and Egypt’s former institutions were being challenged. The book does a wonderful job exploring the contemporary issues of Egypt at the time, namely the movement of new and old ideas, and the poverty and corruption that created hardships for everyday Egyptians
Sebastian Torres-Torija Midaq Alley Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz is the entertaining story of a unique local alley in Cairo who demonstrates on a day-to-day basis the true colors of a quintessential low class Egyptian society, in a contrast with a present day Egypt that hopes to modernize as the end of World War II occurs. It is the characters that inhabit this alley, along with their individual and communal stories and links that they share that excel this novel into a state of utter glory
Obsession is one of the greatest obstacles for mankind to overcome. In Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the motif of obsession helps to both characterize and even foreshadow the fates of the characters. Both novels illustrate that obsessions with an object or person leads to demise, but the novels differ in how they portray the effects of these obsessions on humanity. Before continuing this analysis, obsession will be clearly defined.