SOURCE: Somekh, Sasson. “The Essence of Naguib Mahfouz.” The Tel Aviv Review 2 (fall 1989): 244-57.

In the following essay, Somekh explicates Mahfouz's vision of Egypt and the human condition as evinced in his short fiction.

I

The Swedish Academy of Letters described the fiction of Naguib Mahfouz, the 1989 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, as “rich in nuance, now clearsightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous.” To this fairly informed characterization, the Egyptian novelist (according to the New York Times) reacted in his typically ambiguous, tongue-in-cheek fashion. “Clarity,” he said, “is valuable, but ambiguity sometimes has its value too.”

The fact is that the variety of Mahfouz's literary enterprise extends beyond both the realistic and the “evocatively ambiguous”. His rich literary production, consisting (so far) of some 35 novels and 12 volumes of short stories, attests to an unmistakable talent, but also to a singular aptitude for trying different literary modes and...