A complex tale of alienation and despair. Unable to achieve psychological renewal in the aftermath of Nasser's revolution, a man sacrifices his work and family to a series of illicit love affairs that intensify his feelings of estrangement. A passionate outcry against irrelevance.
| ||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A former Egyptian revolutionary and poet suffers a male midlife crisis, and the political and the personal, the universal and the particular, merge in Nobel laureate Mahfouz's perceptive 1965 tale of alienation. Here the author characteristically employs florid language, the concept of time as an insidiouspk element and a provocative literary style. A third-person narrative is punctuated by the thoughts of the despairing protagonist Omar, now a successful lawyer who believes he has sold out his ideals: "Samson fell asleep before he could destroy the temple. . . . What has poetry to do with this hulking body, with the preoccupation with legal cases, the construction of apartment buildings, and gluttony to the point of illness?"36 A confused Omar abandons his pregnant wife and his daughters in a promiscuous pursuit of young lovers. His university comrades pk represent the polar aspects of his personality: Mustapha has become a prominent television and radio journalist for whom "acceptance by the public is gratifying, even if it means selling popcorn and watermelon seeds";50 Othman, recently released from a long imprisonment for political crimes committed by all three, remains a zealot, a danger to himself as well as to Omar.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Language Notes
Text: English, Arabic (translation)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Description of conflicts within self and society,
By M. A. ZAIDI "Ali Zaidi" (Karachi; Pakistan) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Beggar (Paperback)
Set in Cairo in the early 1950s, this novel portrays the psychological torment of Omar, an ardent revolutionary in his youth who in middle age has been left behind by Nasser's 1952 Revolution. His conscience has died. As he struggles for psychological renewal, he gives up his work and his family to a series of love affairs, which simply increase his alienation from himself and from the rest of the world. In The Beggar, the lawyer Omar seems confined in his uneventful life. The doctors are helpless; as he seems in good health, but he is being eaten away by anxiety and a feeling of futility. As a way of escape, he sets out to experience everything that goes against norms of respectable married life, he in hope of discovering his illness; looses himself in himself in licentiousness and sexual pleasure . However, his nightly adventures themselves disappear in the morning light, and he remains absent to the world. He wishes to be in the heart of a lover -- he seems to have become a dead man among the living. Even when he meets his old friend the militant leftist Osman Khalil as the latter leaves prison, he cannot find himself again. He admires the energy of his friend, whose militant ardour years in prison have done nothing to cool, but he, Omar El-Hamzaoui, is undermined from within, like a body that has neither natural impulses nor desire. A dead beggar among the living, he now calls upon death to give him a taste for living again and the feeling that he belongs in the world. The value of The Beggar does not lie in the dialogue it contains about the superiority of science over art in the technological age, which is a theme that is in any case exhausted. Instead, it lies in the fact that this novel introduced the Arab reader to the opposition between nihilism, or a life without horizons, and the belief that the world and society are open to change. In this novel, the latter belief is no longer tenable, being neither as full nor as positive as reforming discourse would have it be. Instead, the 1960s citizen has discovered his insignificance in the face of the nationalist State's repressive machinery. Not even free to be himself, he is forced into evasion, silence and the silencing of his conscience.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A STORY ON LEAVING OFF THE WORLD,
By Robert (Buenos Aires, Capital Federal Argentina) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Beggar (Paperback)
As it always occurs with Mahfouz, he has brilliantly built the feelings and reasons of a common man to let himself leave off his everyday and "normal" life, in the pursue of something that, at the beginning, not even he himself knows. Boredom and insatisfaction is all he got from his surroundings, work, family. The search for "feeling alive" became an interior struggle which ends with the birth of a "beggar". The climax of the story is admirably led by Mahfouz, who, once more, had gifted us with a very human and touching tale. I recommend this title as one that no one can miss, especially if one is a fan of Nobel Prize's Mahfouz. I give it 4 stars only, because I have read better books of his from the same period, but this do not diminishes the value of this one.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The world is governed by unreason,
By
This review is from: The Beggar (Paperback)
`The Beggar' is a thriller-like political novel which attacks the policies and economic measures (including the nationalization of private property) taken by the revolutionary government under Nasser in Egypt.
A famous lawyer falls into a deep apathy. Nothing interests him anymore, not his family, not sex, nor politics. He retires from public life because, `imagine that you win a lawsuit and repossess your land, but, that the state confiscates it immediately again!' In his youth, the lawyer was a member of a revolutionary group, of which one member had been captured and put in prison. But, fortunately, he didn't betray the other members: 'The men who tortured me, were the same sons of the people, for whom I had been fighting. Is life only cowardice and stupidity?' Everybody believed that Nasser's revolution would erase everything, but all revolutionaries of all stripes have long memories. The former co-fighters, which brought the monarchy down, split into hostile factions. In his characteristic ironic style, Naguib Mahfouz paints a paralyzed society, frustrated by the new regime which lost rapidly its revolutionary momentum and turned into a vulgar settling of scores between the victors. A must read for all lovers of world literature.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
