The Time and the Place: And Other Stories [Paperback]

Naguib Mahfouz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 1992

Selected and translated by the distinguished scholar Denys Johnson-Daivies, these stories have all the celebrated and distinctive characters and qualities found in Mahfouz's novels:  The denizens of the dark, narrow alleyways of Cairo, who struggle to survive the poverty; melancholy ruminations on death; experiments with the supernatural; and witty excursions into Cairene middle-class life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nobel laureate Mahfouz's varied stories of Cairo, more pointed than his discursive novels, rank with the finest anywhere.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Mahfouz, Egyptian novelist and 1988 Nobel laureate, is here represented by a novel and a book of stories showing his concern with the past versus the present a la Proust. The Search tells of Saber, son of a whore in Alexandria who deserted his high-born father at the time of his birth. She tells him on her deathbed that he must try to find his father in Cairo as his sole refuge from a life of crime. In Cairo, Saber meets two women, Elham and Karima. Elham counsels patients, but he yields to the opportunism of Karima's request that he kill her landlord husband for his money. Too late, he learns that Karima has been using him and that Elham in fact represented the better side of his nature. The Time and the Place , which includes a commendable introduction by the translator, is a collection of stories published from 1962 to 1988. It details the life of Cairo residents as they try to survive poverty, brood over death, and endure outmoded tradition. In the title story, which contemplates the supernatural, the narrator offers subjective explanation for the history of a family that lived in an old house. "The Empty Cafe" is a superb evocation of the loneliness of old age. "The Ditch" details a middle-class family forced by housing shortages to move into their ancestral mausoleum. Mahfouz is a somber writer, but his subtle narrative technique and stately prose give one much to ponder. Both books are recommended.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (June 18, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385264720
• ISBN-13: 978-0385264723
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,146,681 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The many faces of old Cairo, July 12, 2001

By 

Stephen Taylor (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: THE TIME AND THE PLACE (Paperback)

Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz was the great chronicler of Cairo's dark alleyways and murky souls. Born in 1911, he was educated in philosophy at the University of Cairo and spent most of his life as a civil servant . While he seldom travelled abroad, he was strongly inlfuenced by the likes of men like Proust, Balzac, Dickens, and Camus. He won the Nobel Prize in 1988.

"The Time and the Place and Other Stories" is a great place to begin if you've never read anything by Mahfouz and a welcome slice of his short fiction if you're only familiar with his novels. One is struck by the variety of the stories collected here. Written between 1962 and 1989, they incapsulate Mahfouz's concern with everything from political injustice to the downfall of families to loneliness and death and the anguished world-weariness that merges gradually, in many characters, into mysticism.

The Borgesean "The Man and the Other Man" (even the title is Borgesean) is a dark political allegory about a murderer stalking his victim; at the end, though, he finds himself woven into a labyrinthine nightmare of his own creation. In contrast to this tale's surrealism, "The Answer is No" is a realistic, outspokenly "feminist" tale about a resolute young woman who scorns the advances of an old tutor of hers and seeks to avoid love in order to devote her life to teaching, "persuading herself that happiness is not confined to love and motherhood. Never has she regretted her firm decision." Side by side with these are stories like the title-piece, a semi-fantastic tale about a man who digs up an ancient parchment in his garden which leads him, in a bizarre (but, in retrospect, hilarious) ending, into trouble with the law, and "The Empty Café", about an old teacher "cursed by a long life" who has seen all his friends and now his wife die and is left, at last, alone, shipwrecked at the end of his days in an age that is not his. Alongside these are the folktale-ish "The Conjurer Made Off With the Dish" and the mystical "Zaabalawi", Mahfouz's most famous story, about a man hunting for an elusive healer-sheikh.

I thought a few of the stories were a flop (for instance, "The Tavern of the Black Cat", in which a man walks into a café and, for no reason I could catch, refuses to let anyone leave; the jumbled up ending left me with the impression that Mahfouz just couldn't pull it off.) Otherwise, there's no reason why this book should be out of print. It's worth finding. 5 stars.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Collection of Short Stories by Egypt's Most Famous Writer, January 3, 2011

By 

Suchos - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Time and the Place: And Other Stories (Paperback)

This is a collection of twenty short-stories by Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize-winning author who is considered the most famous author of modern Egypt. These stories were written between 1962 and 1988, and include (according to the introduction) his "best and blackest," written in the aftermath of Egypt's humiliating loss to Israel in the 1967 war.

Although all but one of the stories is set in Cairo, Mahfouz is more concerned with capturing pieces of humanity -- with all its emotions, fears, weaknesses and failures -- than with the city that forms the backdrop. Those pieces of humanity sometimes trump the narrative arc, as in "The Conjurer Made Off With the Dish" or "Blessed Night," which have little in the way of plot and are carried entirely in the heads and through the eyes of their protagonists. The writer plays with the supernatural (as in "Zaabalawi" or "The Time and the Place"), unsolveable crimes ("By a Person Unknown"), predatory government functionaries ("The Norwegian Rat"), merciless justice officials ("Fear" and "His Majesty") and especially time as a conspirator ("Half a Day," "A Long Term Plan," "The Wasteland," "The Time and the Place") to create a sense of alienation and utter powerlessness in the face of a capricious universe. There are flashes of brightness ("The Norwegian Rat" comes closest to being funny, and "Conjurer" captures some of the sweetness of childhood lived with diminished fear of consequences). But above all, the pervading pessimism reflects a writer produced by the Egypt of Mahfouz' day, complete with a sense of all-consuming poverty, a useless or oppressive government, dehumanization, the arbitrariness of fate.

I recommend this book to fans of all literature, and especially of the exotic. The reader needs little if any background knowledge of Egypt or the Middle East, although of course it would help. The point is that even though Cairo's dusty streets may be distant, the raw emotions Mahfouz captures are universal.