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    The Quarter
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    The Quarter
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    The Quarter
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    The Quarter

    By Naguib Mahfouz and Elif Shafak

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Meet the people of Cairo’s Gamaliya quarter. There is Nabqa, son of Adam the waterseller who can only speak truths; the beautiful and talented Tawhida who does not age with time; Ali Zaidan, the gambler, late to love; and Boss Saqr who stashes his money above the bath. A neighbourhood of demons, dancing and sweet halva, the quarter keeps quiet vigil over the secrets of all who live there.

    This collection by pre-eminent Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz was recently discovered among his old papers. Found with a slip of paper titled ‘for publishing 1994’, they are published here for the first time. Resplendent with Mahfouz’s delicate and poignant observations of everyday happenings, these lively stories take the reader deep into the beating heart of Cairo.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSaqi Books
    Release dateJul 1, 2019
    ISBN9780863563850
    Unavailable
    The Quarter
    Author

    Naguib Mahfouz

    Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. His nearly forty novels and hundreds of short stories range from re-imaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in August 2006.

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    Reviews for The Quarter

    4/5

    24 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A collection of 18 previously unpublished short stories- really sketches- by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Many of the sketches are only two or three pages, written in a very minimalist style- often with only one or two named characters, and just a few events, all set in an extremely impoverished neighborhood in Cairo, "The Quarter". Although we sense the the stories are taking place in the 20th century, there is very little modern technology mentioned, so that really they could have taken place anytime in the past thousand years in any conservative, traditional Muslim city. Most stories have the style of neighborhood gossip- this girl ran off with the baker's son, this homeless boy heard a ghost- but they aim to speak universal truths. Sometimes there is a moral, but often the story is about bad luck or human nature. Highly recommended to those interested in Mahfouz and in the anthropology of everyday life in a large Arab city.
    • 3/5
      Naguib Mahfouz was the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and no other Arabic writer has been awarded the Nobel Prize since Mahfouz received it in 1988. (Orhan Pamuk, winner in 2006, wrote in Turkish which is not the same as Arabic.) Given how many Arabic speakers there are in the world (420 million) you would think that there would have been somebody else deserving of the award. French writing laureates number 14 as do German writing winners and those languages are spoken by only one-quarter of the number that speak Arabic. It's not news that the selection for Nobel Literature laureates is manifestly skewed towards white, male Europeans but it does make an interesting backdrop to this book.Mahfouz died in 2006 but this collection of stories was only found recently. They were labellled with a piece of paper saying "For publishin 1994". It's not surprising that they were not published then as Mahfouz was attacked and wounded severely in 1994 as a result of a fatwa issued by a Muslim cleric because Mahfouz supported Salman Rushdie's right to publish after a fatwa was issued against him for writing The Satanic Verses. After reading these stories I wonder if Mahfouz was quite finished his editing of them as some seem clunky and uneven. Or perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood to read these.I did like the story entitled "Tawhida" which is about a young girl who married into the narrator's family and charmed everyone. The narrator seems to have been smitten by her but lost track of her for years. Then one day when he is old a car pulls up in front of him with an old woman as a passenger and she waves to him. He doesn't recognize her. "She had a face that might be an icon to old age: gaunt, pale, thin, and wrinkled. She was wearing dark glasses." But as soon as he heard her voice "the past came rushing back like a perfume bottle smashing to the ground." Such lovely imagery!I have read Mahfouz's more famous book, Midaq Alley, which I enjoyed ver much. So I hope this little book will please some reader.
    • 3/5
      Few of these microfictions, unpublished in Mahfouz's lifetime and recently rediscovered by a researcher, amount to wholly-realised stories. Most are simply sketches, with the most frequent trope being the beggar / madman figure whose prophecy unsurprisingly comes true. Other stock characters are the "Boss" of the titular Quarter, the vendor of sweets / pickles / bread etc., and the imam. None of these pieces will stick in the memory, but the economical prose is perfectly fine and the stories as a whole succeed in evoking their Gamaliya setting.The scant 60 or so small pages of prose are padded out with a foreword, a translator's introduction, Mahfouz's Nobel speech (not one of the best) and copies of his Arabic holograph for four of the pieces. Despite this extra material and the high production values, this is for Mahfouz completists or Cairo-lovers only.
    • 5/5
      Collection of 18 fascinating vignettes of the inhabitants of a quarter [hara] in modern Cairo. Each is a parable or folktale-like short story with a central theme and often a pithy gnomic aphorism; some stories only 2 or 3 pages. The civil authority [Head of the Quarter] and spiritual leader, the Imam appear in each story and might sum up the conclusion. In "The Oven" we read of a pair of lovers from different classes--a baker and a merchant's daughter--who elope and though her father has written her off, saves him from bankruptcy. "She has returned; she needs no forgiveness", the Head tells the Imam. This was my favorite story. In "Pursuit", a wronged woman badgers the man who has given her a child out of wedlock; this one reminded me somewhat of the Biblical Unjust Judge and the Widow parable in its emphasis on persistence. Naqba, in another story, cannot lie. In "The Arrow", a man is killed and the story shows how people still cling to superstitions, in spite of the all-too-human logic of the action in front of them.In "The End of Boss Saqr" a man's first wife finds out what her dying husband had meant by whispering to her: "Over the bath."In "Tawhida", the title character always remains young in the narrator's mind although many years have passed.The book also included Mahfouz's Nobel Prize Acceptance speech and four of these stories in the original Arabic in the author's handwriting.Highly recommended, although the author's [Cairo Trilogy] might be a better introduction to his oeuvre.
    • 5/5
      These short stories, set in the Gamaliya Quarter of Cairo, have the feel of fables and parables. Family, religion and community play a large part in the lives of the quarter residents, and a large part in their troubles. An unwed mother makes it so the father will never be able to avoid seeing his unacknowledged baby. The “Son of the Quarter” calls out the transgressions of prominent people upon instructions from an unseen voice. Tragedy ensues when a Sheikh divorces his young wife for reasons not her fault. A madman predicts a death.The stories are short and deceptively simple at times, belying the depth of their message. Naguib Mahfouz focuses on the lives of the lives of the residents, adds some supernatural beliefs and elements at times, and creates beautiful little slices of life. They portray the frailty, faith and kindness of human nature. His 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech is worth reading by itself. “Today, the greatness of a civilised leader ought to be measured by the universality of his vision and his sense of responsibility towards all humankind.” Truer now than ever.The cover is a beautiful depiction of the quarter and the original handwritten Arabic text of a few stories are included in the book.
    • 4/5
      I think it is more likely that readers who have read Mahfouz's novels will appreciate these short stories more than readers who have not. Mahfouz is known for his ability to immerse the reader in the life and lives in Cairo with his incredible characters and evocative prose. These stories seem like character sketches. Apparently they were found among the author's belongings after his death. I think they were not intended to be published, yet nonetheless they convey the mindset of life in "the quarter", the secrecy, the superstition, and the intrigue. A fantastic bonus is that Mahfouz' s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature is included with the stories. Such a gifted man and eloquent representative of his culture!