I Found Myself

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)

""The Arab world's foremost novelist.""

""Mahfouz's work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical.""

""A towering literary figure.""

""A master of both detailed realism and fabulous storytelling.""

""Mahfouz is a storyteller of the first order in any idiom.""

""Mahfouz's work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical. The Nobel Prize acknowledges the universal significance of his fiction.""

""The incredible variety of Naguib Mahfouz's writings continues to dazzle our eyes.""

"A dream journal kept by Egyptian Nobel laureate Mahfouz in the last years of his life reveals poetry and mystery in brief, enigmatic bursts… As suggested in the introduction by Hisham Matar and underscored by evocative photographs by Diana Matar, the more constant presence throughout this book may be the city of Cairo."

"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."

"Elegant, often haunting evocations of a lost world at the end of life."

"Not many writers can pull off an accomplished book of dreams. Thankfully, Naguib Mahfouz is one who absolutely can. Some of these stories have an allegorical quality to them; others play out like fables or quietly growing revelations."

"In a collage of fragmented scenes depicting missed connections, thwarted love, and family drama, Mahfouz contends with his "aging self," imagines himself a soccer star, and returns to his childhood homes."

"Between Mahfouz’s exploration, in old age, of his own self after trauma, Diana Matar’s shadow-drenched images of fleeting moments in Cairo, and Hisham Matar’s fluent translation from Arabic to English, this is a thrilling book."

"For Mahfouz and Matar, writing, much like dreaming, is a process of weaving together the remembered past, the imagined future, and the present. Mahfouz's dreams conjure liberatory geographies for a Cairo once obsolete and unfinished: a Cairo always on the horizon."

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.