New Review - Naguib Mahfouz - Adrift on the Nile

The latest addition to the website is my review of Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz' novel, Adrift on the Nile.

Adrift on the Nile is a stoner comedy without the stoner, and it's missing a lot of the comedy. Instead, Mahfouz has fashioned a melancholic and rambunctious (an odd combination, yes) tale of intellectuals who are unhappy with their lives, but unwilling to change them. They smoke, they laugh, they live, and they - well, that's it. A deeply existential novel, Adrift on the Nile cuts to the bone of the easy conceit of the intellectual that their life is better simply because they think. Mahfouz shows this is not the case, and in his careful deconstruction, everything is game and everything is attacked. Another genre in which Mahfouz shows himself a master.

You can read the review here.

Other titles by Mahfouz also under review:
---Before the Throne
---The Thief and the Dogs
---The Time and the Place