Here is another book for Melissa's book challenge. The advantage of this one is that it is also one of the book on my "99 books that capture the Spirit of Africa" list.Naguib Mahfouz is a fabulous writer, or is this too obvious since he is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature"?
He writes stories which could nearly be taken to be simple. As you read his work though you cannot help but know that everything is a metaphor, everything is a parable but you cannot tell for sure what the message is, if there is one really and if what you read in it tells you more about yourself or about Naguib Mahfouz. His writing is loaded with morals, messages, typically unspoken truisms about human nature and philosophical thoughts. "Adrift on the Nile" is no different that way. It is the story of few friends who have respectable and even successful lives in day time but meet in the evening on a houseboat on the Nile to smoke kif (obviously a drug from the story, a mildly hallucigenic possibly, but honestly I do not know). Anis Zaki lives on the house boat. He is the "master of ceremonies" and all the other characters just drop by. From the start you get the sense that these friends have been meeting regularly for a long time and even though small things in their meetings may change their friendship has been the same for a long time and is both shallow and solid at the same time. One day one of them brings a young woman, self proclaimed "serious woman". She is a journalist who dreams to write plays and does not share the water pipe with them. From that point on things change slightly, enough for them to decide one evening to take a road trip instead of staying at the boathouse. During this trip an accident happens and their friendship and lives are changed. I really don't want to say too much and spoil the book for you.
Maybe on another day I would describe the book as a story showing the struggle of people between futility and seriousness, or is it between absurdity and meaning, right and wrong, hope and despair, sadness and principles (I know a weird juxtaposition here)?
What can I say it is a book by Naguib Mahfouz and you have to read it so you can decide what it is for you. Truth is there is no story, or none that you need to remember, there are only situations and feelings, relations and reactions, basically people getting together every night and being friends.
Here is a passage... I guess I should say that one of the character who is a known womanizer possibly fell in love with the "Serious young woman" and is asked if he would contemplate marriage...here it is:
" He paused a moment before saying: "No." His hesitation made a deep impression on everyone. Why don't I put the brazier out on the balcony and have my own fire festival? Its blaze is immortal, unlike that of false stars. But women are like the dust, known not only by their rich scent but by the way they seep and settle into you. Cleopatra, for all her amours, never divulged the secret of her heart. The love of a woman is like political theater: there is no doubt about the loftiness of its goals, but you wonder about the integrity of it. No one benefits from this houseboat like the rats and the cockroaches and the geckos. And nothing bursts in unannounced through your door like grief. And yesterday the dawn said to me when it broke that really it had no name."
