Respected Sir - Hardcover

Mahfouz, Naguib

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385264798 ISBN 13: 9780385264792

Publisher: Doubleday, 1990

Synopsis

In RESPECTED SIR -- first published in Arabic in 1975 -- Mahoufz retells a familiar theme -- vaulting ambition -- in a powerful and religious metaphor.

About this title

About the Author

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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Reviews

With this portrait of a misanthropic civil servant, the Egyptian Nobel laureate devises a cunning send-up of egregious ambition, stodgy bureaucracy and cloying piety. Mahfouz's overblown language mirrors the grandiose aspirations of his protagonist Othman Bayyumi, a common archives clerk who schemes for a lofty appointment as Director General, expounding that "a government position is a brick in the edifice of the state, and the state is an exhalation of the spirit of God, incarnate on earth." As Egypt experiences the birth pangs of nationalism, Othman remains an apolitical, selfish loner wallowing in his self-imposed misery, who fawns over his superiors, works like a dervish and squirrels away his money, his only physical pleasures the visits he pays religiously to a prostitute, which "were usually followed by a wholehearted plea for forgiveness and a prolonged resort to prayer and worship."45 Envisioning marriage as a means to forge social connections that will launch him to glory, he viciously turns down prospective brides; because no one is good enough for him, he ends up in his later years with two wives, one a opium-addict aging prostitute, the other a young woman who uses him as he sought to use others. This was originally published in Egypt in 1975.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385264798
• ISBN 13: 9780385264792
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200