Qushtumur (Mahfuz)
Qushtumur ( Arabic قشتمر) is a novel by the Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate in literature Nagib Mahfuz (1911-2006). The novel was published in 1988 and was the author's last published novel.
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The focus of the action is the Qushtumur café in the Cairo district of al-iyaAbbasiya, which the author knows from personal experience. Here the narrator meets at regular intervals with four friends, all of whom were born in 1910 and who were already acquainted with each other as elementary school students. Their résumés reflect the history of Egypt over around 70 years, from the beginning of the 20th century through the Second World War and the revolution of 1952 , the wars of 1967 and 1973 to the transition period in the 1980s. Like most of Mahfuz's works, this development novel has political significance and critically describes the prevailing conditions in Egypt, the deceptive course of revolutions and the nature of leaders. One of the coffeehouse visitors remarked: "As long as there are people who give and not take, there will of course always be those who take and not give." The novel is not divided into chapters, the passage of time appears as a flowing continuum. At the beginning, the book conjures up the al-bAbbasiya quarter from the days of youth that have long since disappeared, similar to Proust's In Search of Lost Time , and ends when one of the narrator's four friends declaims the sura ad-Duhā from the Koran .
Qushtumur has been translated into English under the title "The Coffeehouse" and in Hebrew as "Our Café".
literature
- Rasheed El-Enany: Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning . Routledge, 2003. pp. 95-99.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rasheed El-Enany: Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning . P. 95. Online partial view
- ↑ Gamal al-Ghitani: The Mahfouz Dialogs American University in Cairo Press, 2007. p. 10. Online partial view