Dreams

(2013) In his shortest short stories, the Egyptian Nobel literature laureate reduced the fictional form to its most essential level, while retaining his justifiably famous mastery of the storytelling art. A man finds that all the streets in his neighborhood have turned into a circus—but his joy at the sight changes to anger when he sees he cannot escape it anywhere, even in his own home. A group of lifelong friends meet to trade jokes in a familiar alley—only to face a sudden, deadly flood that echoes the revenge taken by an ancient Egyptian queen upon the men who murdered her husband. A girl from the dreamer’s childhood flies with him from his native lane on a cart drawn by a winged horse, to become a star in the firmament above the Great Pyramid. Such is the stuff of Naguib Mahfouz’s The Dreams—his only major work after a knife attack by a religious fanatic in 1994 left him unable to write for several years. First serialized in a Cairo magazine, The Dreams are a unique and haunting mixture of the deceptively quotidian, the seductively lyrical, and the savagely nightmarish—the richly condensed sum of more than nine decades of artistic genius and everyday experience.