Description: I Found Myself: Last Dreams confirms again the richness and variety of Mahfouz's storytelling--"the single most important writer in modern Arabic literature" (Newsweek)
Brief description: Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. Of his nearly forty novels, the 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. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in August 2006.
Review Quotes: Sad, strange, comic (often all at once), these mosaic shards build into an elusive pattern... Something in them resists translation from night into day, just as Diana Matar's intriguingly shaded, cropped and angled photos tempt us with the promise of a narrative -- and deny it. We learn that private experience, asleep or awake, will always escape its interpretations. Both words and images guard their mystery.--Boyd Tonkin "Financial Times"