Wedding Song

by Naguib Mahfouz

Overview

Wedding Song- Wedding Song is a novel by Naguib Mahfouz narrated by four characters. All four are closely connected: the husband and wife Karam and Halima, their son Abbas, and a co-worker who rented a room in their house, Tariq. They are all associated with a local theater: Karam worked as a prompter for a while, Halima started there as a cashier, Tariq has long been an actor. The story revolves around a play that Abbas has written, which has been accepted by the owner of the theater. However, the play is closely based on real events; it faithfully mirrors their real life and horrible blemishes, and the theater owner still has no problem staging it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789778616163
Publisher:	Diwan
Publication date:	01/01/2024
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years
Language:	Arabic

About the Author

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, his works range from reimaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. Over a career that lasted more than five decades, he wrote 33 novels, 13 short story anthologies, numerous plays, and 30 screenplays. Of his many works, most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations, from 1917 until 1952. In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in Arabic to do so. He died in August 2006.

Editorial Reviews

A new play is the talk of Cairo. Through the script, the author, a young unknown named Abbas Karam Younis, seems to implicate himself in the death of his ailing wife and the disclosure to the police of his mother, a prostitute, and his father, a gambler. Then Abbas mysteriously vanishes, leaving behind a suicide note but no corpse. Previously published here in a limited edition, this 1981 novel by the Egyptian Nobel laureate adopts the Faulkneresque device of employing a different character to narrate each chapter. All four accounts are marked by a deft blend of everyday details of Cairo life and compelling, stream-of-consciousness monologues. ``Abbas could never betray his mother,'' she muses at one point. ``He may have scorned everything else, but not my love. Love is stronger than evil itself.'' Throughout, Mahfouz probes the nature of art: what is real, what is fantasy. ``A play is just a play. Nothing more,'' one character says. ``Otherwise, the law would have the right to put ninety percent of our authors in the prisoner's dock.'' This transcendent book is evidence of how well Mahfouz's penetrating stories travel across cultural borders. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly