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Rasheed El-Enany. Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning. New York. Routledge. 1993. 271 pages. $59.95 ($17.95 paper).
When Naguib Mahfouz became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in 1988 (see WLT 63:1, pp. 5-9), the inexplicable void in the amount of Western theoretical works dealing with the author, as with Arabic literature as a whole, became more apparent than ever. Although the years that followed witnessed the publication of a number of analytic works on Mahfouz's oeuvre, none has been as encompassing or as ambitious as Rasheed El-Enany's Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning.
The first chapter provides for the reader not closely familiar with Mahfouz's work an excellent biographical account of the laureate's life, which includes a discussion of literary influences...