Elegant, often haunting evocations of a lost world at the end of life.
Vignettes recounting the author’s ethereal dreams of old age, many centering on death and roads not taken.
Translator Matar, a Libyan novelist, met Mahfouz not long after a would-be killer attacked the Nobel Prize–winning author in a Cairo alley, nearly stabbing him to death. Mahfouz recovered, but he seldom ventured out in public again, at least not alone. Before his death in 2006, he recorded dreams that, writes Matar, “are an insight into Mahfouz’s twilight concerns.” In one, Mahfouz dreams that he has been walking along a road when an open window reveals a woman whom he immediately recognizes, though 50 years had robbed her of her beauty. “In the morning,” he writes, “I was deeply unsettled when, reading the newspaper, I came upon her obituary. I was profoundly saddened and wondered which of us had visited the other at that hour of death?” In another dream—and almost all of these vignettes begin “I found myself” or “I saw myself”—he encounters his long-dead mother, who “received [him] with perplexing indifference and then left the room.” Let the oneirologists make of that what they will, but it all makes eminent sense: One door is closing, another is opening. Other of Mahfouz’s dreams point to his political opposition to numerous Egyptian regimes: In one he finds himself in a train station with two areas, one quiet and conducive to work, the other noisy and full of sights and smells. When Mahfouz prefers the first, his companion says, “Yes, but I spotted some of our opponents in the other section,” to which Mahfouz replies, “I am ready for a confrontation.” So, as ever, he is, though always with humane intent, honoring what a different companion tells him in another dream: “One must, as long as we are alive, retain some good faith.”
Elegant, often haunting evocations of a lost world at the end of life.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780811231022
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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