Egypt's Greatest Writer

Naguib Mahfouz died yesterday. He was one of the world's great writers. Here's what the late Edward Said wrote about him on www.counterpunch.org back in December, 2001.


...Mahfouz has the intellectual and literary means to convey in a manner entirely his own--powerful, direct, subtle. Like his characters (who are always described right away, as soon as they appear), Mahfouz comes straight at you, immerses you in a thick narrative flow, then lets you swim in it, all the while directing the currents, eddies, and waves of his characters' lives, Egypt's history under prime ministers like Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa El-Nahhas, and dozens of other details of political parties, family histories, and the like, with extraordinary skill. Realism, yes, but something else as well: a vision that aspires to a sort of all-encompassing view not unlike Dante's in its twinning of earthly actuality with the eternal...

Edward Said