Farewell, Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz died today.
From Edward Said’s essay on Mahfouz and memory:
Mahfouz is anything but a humble storyteller who haunts Cairo’s cafes and essentially works away quietly in his obscure corner. The stubbornness and pride with which he has held to the rigour of his work for a half-century, with its refusal to concede to ordinary weakness, is at the very core of what he does as a writer. What mostly enables him to hold his astonishingly sustained view of the way eternity and time are so closely intertwined is his country, Egypt itself…(via email from Nandini)
