Naguib Mahfouz: Egyptian Nobel Laureate

Concern with social issues prevails in Mahfouz's realistic novels. His fictional characters come largely from the lower-middle-class stratum of Cairene society and many of them bear clear autobiographical marks. In fact, many of the novels themselves bear the names of the quarters of historical Cairo in which Mahfouz grew up. Many of Mahfouz's plots enact a search for upward mobility in a society severely strained by socio-economic stratification. The quest, however, is seldom successful. Telling familiar stories in ever-changing, freshly nuanced ways is a major characteristic of Mahfouz's works and a key to understanding his widespread popularity in the Arab world. In his novels, the universal is packaged in the concrete details of local color and specific national setting.

Many of Mahfouz's novels were made into movies, films that won the hearts of the Egyptian people and starred such famous actors as Omar Sherif and Faten Hamama. You can find a nice list of the films at the Internet Movie Database. I've even seen some of them available for sale on eBay.

Naguib Mahfouz's work has left its mark around the world. He influenced other writers, intrigued critics, and enchanted movie audiences for decades. The following quotations represent just a sample of the comments others have had about the man and his body of work.

"One of the greatest creative talents in the realm of the novel in the world."
-Nadine Gordimer

"As a citizen Naguib Mahfouz sees civility and the continuity of a transnational, abiding, Egyptian personality in his work as perhaps surviving the debilitating processes of conflict and historical degeneration which he, more than anyone else I have read, has so powerfully depicted."
-Edward Said

"He is not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romain."
-London Review of Books

"Naguib Mahfouz is the greatest writer in one of the most widely understood languages in the world, a storyteller of the first order in any idiom."
-Vanity Fair

"The alleys, the houses, the palaces and mosques and the people who live among them are evoked as vividly in Mahfouz's work as the streets of London were conjured by Dickens."
-Newsweek

"Throughout Naguib Mahfouz's fiction there is a pervasive sense of metaphor, of a literary artist who is using his fiction to speak directly and unequivocally to the condition of his country. His work is imbued with love for Egypt and its people, but it is also utterly honest and unsentimental."
-Washington Post

"Mahfouz's work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical. The Nobel Prize acknowledges the universal significance of [his] fiction."
-Los Angeles Times

"Mahfouz presents us with a different concept of the world and makes it real. His genius is not just that he shows us Egyptian colonial society in all its complexity; it is that he makes us look through the vision of his vivid characters and see people and ideas that no longer seem so alien."
-Philadelphia Inquirer