The Seventh Heaven

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Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1988 became the first Arab Nobel laureate in literature, is justifiably known as one of the greatest realist writers of the last century. But he is equally a master of the bizarre, the supernatural, even the macabre.

To be sure, Mahfouz’s oeuvre, encompassing some sixty books covering virtually every style and genre of fiction, is both vast and immensely varied. Best known for straightforward stories of life in his native city, such as his famous Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street), so accurately does he capture the ways of the poor that it is said you can smell the “popular quarters” on the page. Yet in the same works and many others, he is just as adept at portraying the wealthy and the middle class, both women and men.

This same versatility extends to time and place as well: some of his earliest stories are highly readable (though for long, oddly underrated), increasingly allegorical romances set in his country’s rich pharaonic past. His first three “historical” novels, Khufu’s Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, and Thebes at War, published in 1939, 1943, and 1944 respectively, have only recently appeared in English, along with a book of short stories set in ancient times, Voices from the Other World. His 1985 novella, Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth, about the pharaoh who suppressed worship of all deities but the sun god Aton, also came out in English less than a decade ago. These are only a few examples of the complexity of his output in the past seventy years or more.

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