SOURCE: “But Wisdom Lingers,” in Spectator, February 22, 1997, p. 28.

In the following review, de Botton offers a generally favorable assessment of Echoes of an Autobiography.

This is an autobiography only in the loosest sense. We don't hear where the author was born, what his childhood was like or, as Holden Caulfield would say, ‘all that David Copperfield kind of crap.’ Naguib Mahfouz, the 86-year-old Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning novelist, hasn't written directly about his past, more about what it feels like to have a past, to have a long life to look over; in essence, to be old.

Echoes of an Autobiography is a slim book, divided into short, loosely connected, aphoristic paragraphs which deal with poignant, often lyrical moments of remembering. The author returns to a street in Cairo to attend the funeral of an old woman. Towering buildings have replaced elegant villas, the street is crammed with cars...