THE TIME AND THE PLACE AND OTHER STORIES; (DJ protected by a brand new, clear, acid-free mylar cover)

Selected and translated by the distinguished scholar Denys Johnson-Daivies, these stories have all the celebrated and distinctive characters and qualities found in Mahfouz's novels:  The denizens of the dark, narrow alleyways of Cairo, who struggle to survive the poverty; melancholy ruminations on death; experiments with the supernatural; and witty excursions into Cairene middle-class life.

Much more concise and pointed than his discursive novels, Nobel Prize winner Mahfouz's short stories must rank with the finest anywhere. Variety is the keynote of these 20 fluently translated tales, which range from a Kafkaesque allegory of an apartment dweller's obsession with rodents ("The Norwegian Rat") to the moving, passionately feminist "The Answer Is No," about a teacher who chooses independence and self-respect over a marriage proposal from the tutor who raped her. Mahfouz's Cairo is bursting with countless tragedies, comic absurdities and hope. In "The Ditch," a solitary civil servant takes up residence in his family's burial vault, already occupied by squatters. A genie's blessing turns into a nightmare of police repression in the supernatural title story. Dark parables, psychological realism, wisdom quests, political satire--Mahfouz is inobtrusive master of every mode. This volume is the first selection of his stories available in English.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Twenty short stories--selected by Mahfouz--from some 14 volumes published in Arabic between 1962 and 1988, the year he became a Nobel laureate: all but four, set mostly in a picturesque district of Cairo, appear in English for the first time. Many of the fictions deal with death-haunted denizens of the dark alleyways and lower-classes of Cairo. Some are realistic fables, foreshortened to emphasize the passage of time, while others tend toward Kafkaesque or Borgian fabulism. Of the former, ``Half a Day'' is a nostalgic re-creation of a morning walk to school--the first day in that school--and the afternoon walk home. Ordinary events are transposed to metaphor: ``As our path revealed itself to us, however, we did not find it as totally sweet and unclouded as we had presumed.'' Early pieces like ``Fear'' and ``The Wasteland'' are bleak and fatalistic; in the latter, the narrator, defeated by time, heads ``toward the wasteland.'' Meanwhile, ``The Empty Cafe'' sketches the loneliness of old age in the person of a man whose only friend is a grandson's cat. Of the modernist fables, ``The Man and the Other Man'' is a puzzler in which one reality merges with another; ``Zaabalawi'' is about a Godot-like search for Zaabalawi (``We used to regard him as a man of miracles...''); ``The Time and the Place,'' in which Mahfouz conjures an Arabian Nights atmosphere, begins with ``the gift of miracle'' and ends with the protagonist in handcuffs for reasons that have little to do with individual guilt or innocence. In ``The Norwegian Rat,'' a neighborhood scare over rats that are ``even attacking cats and dogs'' ends with a ravenous official becoming the human equivalent of the much-feared rodent. A magical-mystery sampler, then, of a most original writer. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mahfouz, Egyptian novelist and 1988 Nobel laureate, is here represented by a novel and a book of stories showing his concern with the past versus the present a la Proust. The Search tells of Saber, son of a whore in Alexandria who deserted his high-born father at the time of his birth. She tells him on her deathbed that he must try to find his father in Cairo as his sole refuge from a life of crime. In Cairo, Saber meets two women, Elham and Karima. Elham counsels patients, but he yields to the opportunism of Karima's request that he kill her landlord husband for his money. Too late, he learns that Karima has been using him and that Elham in fact represented the better side of his nature. The Time and the Place , which includes a commendable introduction by the translator, is a collection of stories published from 1962 to 1988. It details the life of Cairo residents as they try to survive poverty, brood over death, and endure outmoded tradition. In the title story, which contemplates the supernatural, the narrator offers subjective explanation for the history of a family that lived in an old house. "The Empty Cafe" is a superb evocation of the loneliness of old age. "The Ditch" details a middle-class family forced by housing shortages to move into their ancestral mausoleum. Mahfouz is a somber writer, but his subtle narrative technique and stately prose give one much to ponder. Both books are recommended.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.