Miramar

Description

This highly charged fable set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the late 1960s, centers on the guests of the Pension Miramar as they compete for the attention of the young servant Zohra. Zohra is a beautiful peasant girl who fled her family to escape an arranged marriage. She becomes the focus of jealousies and conflicts among the Miramar's residents, who include an assortment of radicals and aristocrats floundering in the wake of the Egyptian revolution. It becomes clear that the uneducated but strong-willed Zohra is the only one among them who knows what she wants. As the situation spirals toward violence and tragedy, the same sequence of events is retold from the perspective of four different residents, in the manner of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, weaving a nuanced portrait of the intricacies of post-revolutionary Egyptian life.

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. His nearly forty novels and hundreds of short stories range from re-imaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. 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 the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in August 2006.

"With Miramar we are in the hands of a considerable novelist, and one who knows his country's complex problems, and complex soul, profoundly." --John Fowles