by Hisham Matar
First published 2025
In his last years, Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz recorded his dreams in brief, vivid sketches. The narrator finds himself in his childhood home in El Abbassiya, where his mother greets him with strange coldness before disappearing forever. These nocturnal visions pull him through a Cairo populated by vanished lovers, family members, Egyptian leaders, and mysterious women who may represent the city itself. One recurring figure seems to be a beloved woman from his youth, now lost to time. Friends and rulers drift through these compressed tales, products of a mind that never stops creating stories, even in sleep. The dreams reveal a writer grappling with memory, loss, and the weight of a lifetime spent observing his changing country. Matar brings these Arabic texts into English for the first time, preserving their compressed poetry and emotional directness. The book includes an introduction where Matar recalls meeting the elderly Mahfouz in Cairo shortly after the writer survived an assassination attempt. These final creative works capture the inner life of Egypt's most celebrated modern author.
Genres: 20th-century, african-literature, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Cairo, El Abbassiya
Period: Last Years
160 pages · Paperback · New Directions