Dreams of departure, by Naguib Mahfouz

 

It's been 26 years since I read Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, which I enjoyed as much for the writing as for learning about modern Egyptian culture. Not long after writing those books, Mahfouz was attacked, stabbed by someone inspired by a fatwa placed on him because of another of his books, Children of the Alley. Mahfouz, born in 1911, didn't write very much after that attack, which damaged his nerves and affected his ability to write. However, he did manage to write several collections of dreams. Dreams of Departure is the second of these volumes collecting short narratives that were inspired by actual dreams, on which he expanded with additional fictional details. They are very short; in many cases, they're only a few sentences. Many of them evoke sexual encounters with beautiful women. Others clearly refer to political violence, arrests, detentions, and revolutions. Read as a stand-alone volume, these are slight and generally unsatisfying. However, according to the translator, Raymond Stock, who is a scholar of Mahfouz and is currently writing a biography of him, details in these short dreams provide many clues and references to things that took place in Mahfouz's real life as well as in his fiction, so this book might be more interesting to someone who is more steeped in his other writing.