Bøger af Gamal Al-Ghitani

An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo's old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the cafe owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher's reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humor prevail in this darkly comedic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire.

The Mahfouz Dialogs records the memories, views, and jokes of Naguib Mahfouz on subjects ranging from politics to the relationship between his novels and his life, as delivered to intimate friends at a series of informal meetings stretching out over almost half a century. Mahfouz was a pivotal figure not only in world literature (through being awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988 he became the first writer in Arabic to win a mass audience), but also in his own society, where he vastly enhanced the image of the writer in the eyes of the public and encapsulated-as the victim of a savage attack on his life by an Islamist in 1994-the struggle between pluralism, tolerance, and secularism on the one hand and extremist Islam. Moderated by Gamal al-Ghitani, a writer of a younger generation who shared a common background with Mahfouz (al-Ghitani also grew up in medieval Cairo) and felt a vast personal empathy for the writer despite their sometimes different views, these exchanges throw new light on Mahfouz's life, the creation of his novels, and literary Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century.

In this surrealist novel with political and religious aspects and an edge of satire, the narrator is an unseen, unheard presence with the privilege of observing events from the past. A sense of displaced time saturates the blending of real and unreal events, such as the fight in the desert around Karbala against Israel and the forces of the West (including William Casey (the former CIA director), the narrator's father, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and al-Husayn). Nasser, who has miraculously reappeared after his death, is shocked and appalled to find that peace has been brokered with Israel and that Israelis have made Egypt a holiday destination.

In this special new and expanded edition of the bestselling book first published in 1999, photographer Britta Le Va guides us through the back streets and alleys of Naguib Mahfouz, to produce a collection of outstanding visual images of the historic city, while novelist Gamal al-Ghitani describes a walking tour with the great man around the streets of Gamaliya.

"In the course of my long travels I have never seen a city so devastated. After a long time I ventured out into the streets. Death, cold and heavy, hung in the air. Walls have no value here, doors have been eliminated. No one is certain that they will see another day."