Karnak Cafe

Zusatztext “A fierce yet subtle novel. . . . Every page smolders.” — The New York Sun  “A storyteller of the first order in any idiom.” — Vanity Fair Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext In this gripping and suspenseful novella from the Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner, three young friends survive interrogation by the secret police, only to find their lives poisoned by suspicion, fear, and betrayal. At a Cairo café in the 1960s, a legendary former belly dancer lovingly presides over a boisterous family of regulars, including a group of idealistic university students. One day, amid reports of a wave of arrests, three of the students disappear: the excitable Hilmi, his friend Ismail, and Ismail's beautiful girlfriend Zaynab. When they return months later, they are apparently unharmed and yet subtly and profoundly changed. It is only years later, after their lives have been further shattered, that the narrator pieces together the young people's horrific stories and learns how the government used them against one another. In a riveting final chapter, their torturer himself enters the Café and sits among his former victims, claiming a right to join their society of the disillusioned. Now translated into English for the first time, Naguib Mahfouz's tale of the insidious effects of government-sanctioned torture and the suspension of rights and freedoms in a time of crisis is shockingly contemporary.QurunfulaIt was sheer chance that brought me to the Karnak Cafe. One day I'd made my way to al-Mahdi Street to get my watch repaired; the job was going to take several hours, so I had to wait. To kill the time I decided to look at all the watches, jewelry, and trinkets on display in the store windows on both sides of the street. And that's how I came to stumble across the cafe.It's very small and off the main street. Since that day it's become my favorite place to sit and pass the time. To tell you the truth, at first I hesitated by the entrance for a moment, but then I spotted a woman sitting on a stool by the cash register, the usual spot for the manageress. You could tell she was getting old, and yet she still had vestiges of her former beauty. Those clear, refined features of hers jogged something buried deep in my memory. All of a sudden the images came flooding back. I could hear music and drums. I was sitting there watching a gorgeous body swaying from side to side; the air was permeated by the aroma of incense. A dancer, that's what she was. Yes, the star of 'Imad al-Din, none other than Qurunfula herself! Now there she was sitting on the stool, Qurunfula in person, the roseate dream from the 1940s.So that was how I came to enter the Karnak Cafe. I felt drawn in by some obscure magic force and a carefree heart, and all because of someone who had never even heard of me. We had never had any kind of relationship, whether of affection, self-interest, or simply courtesy. At one time she had been a real star, whereas I was just one of her contemporaries. The admiring glances that I directed at her still-glorious figure seemed to have absolutely no effect on her, and I did not feel I had any reason to go over and say hello. So I just took a seat and started looking around the cafe.It seemed to consist simply of one large room, but it was all neat and tidy. There was wallpaper on the wa...

Product details

• Authors: Naguib Mahfouz
• Assisted by: Roger Allen (Translation)
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 02.12.2008
• EAN: 9780307390455
• ISBN: 978-0-307-39045-5
• No. of pages: 144
• Dimensions: 127 mm x 210 mm x 6 mm
• Series: Anchor Books
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature