I Found Myself...The Last Dreams

(Hardback)

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Description

A surreal record of Naguib Mahfouz's dreams in the great writer's final years. After an assassination attempt in his twilight years, Naguib Mahfouz became a recluse, going out rarely and receiving visitors in his hotel. Cautious and in ill-health, he could only roam the city freely in his dreams. In this mix of vivid vignettes linked together by the author's precisely rendered nightly wanderings through Cairo, figures from Mahfouz's personal life blend with his anxieties about Egypt's political past and future. Each dream is layered with philosophical musings, hopes and desperations, fidelities and disappointments. Over the course of the book they build to a lush and complex picture of Mahfouz' subconscious.

Reviews

The Arab world's foremost novelist * New York Times *
Mahfouz's work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical * Los Angeles Times *
A towering literary figure * Economist *
A master of both detailed realism and fabulous storytelling * Guardian *
Mahfouz is a storyteller of the first order in any idiom * Vanity Fair *
Mahfouz's work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical. The Nobel Prize acknowledges the universal significance of his fiction * Los Angeles Times Book Review *
The incredible variety of Naguib Mahfouz''s writings continues to dazzle our eyes * Washington Post *

Author Bio

Hisham Matar (Translator) Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and nominated for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.