The Mirage: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Novels) Review

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The Mirage: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Novels) ReviewIn this unusual and often charming novel from 1948, newly translated and republished, Naguib Mahfouz writes his only Freudian, psychological study, an analysis of Kamil Ru'ba Laz, a young Egyptian so dominated by his mother that he is unable to make a single decision or form a single successful relationship with the outside world. When the novel opens, his mother has just died, and Kamil, in his late twenties, is devastated. Though he believes that "people who write are, generally speaking, people who aren't alive," he recognizes that he was not really alive before his mother's death. He hopes that writing will allow him "to remember her and to recover her life...[so that] I may be able to repair the thread of my life that's been broken."
The first person novel which results is Kamil's attempt to put his life into perspective and, perhaps, to find some hope for the future. We meet his father, a man from a good family but with no job and a penchant for alcohol, who frequently beats his wife. Kamil's mother leaves him, is persuaded to return, and eventually abandons him forever, taking their children with her. Kamil, born after the abandonment, never knows his father. When Radiya and Medhat, the two older children, are aged ten and nine, however, their father claims them, in accordance with Islamic law, leaving her with only Kamil, to whom she now devotes her whole life.
His mother nurtures what Kamil later recognizes as an "unwholesome relationship...a kind of affection that destroys." He is never out of his mother's sight and is encouraged to depend on her totally--sleeping in the same room and having no sense of personal privacy. He grows up isolated, terrified of the outside world, and excruciatingly shy, unable to speak to strangers. He is mocked by both teachers and students, and he grows up, "forlorn and friendless," a condition that continues into his twenties.

With this totally egocentric life, Kamil is certainly not a candidate for true love, but Mahfouz introduces Kamil's desire for a wife as the turning point of the book. His search for love, his selection of the woman of his dreams, the complications this potential relationship creates with his mother, the effects of his pathological fears on any long-term relationship, and his complete naivete about sex and what it means to be a husband all reflect the influence of his early childhood on his adult life.
Mahfouz has created in Kamil a main character whom it is difficult to like, and now, sixty years after this book was written, difficult to empathize with. Still, Mahfouz's use of a conversational style, his narrative charm, and his easy-going humor keep the reader engaged, hoping for Kamil's success even when tempted to give up on him as a lost cause. Firmly grounded in Kamil's psychological conundrum, Mahfouz stays true to his subject as he explores the effects of family on character, taking the extreme examples of Kamil and his mother to their limits to evaluate whether or not there is some kernel of individuality which can survive such influences, preserve one's essence, and allow for growth in new and contrary directions. n Mary Whipple
Karnak Café
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Morning and Evening TalkThe Mirage: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Novels) OverviewA psychological study of the first order with a subtly Freudian flavor, The Mirage is the autobiographical account of Kamil Ru'ba, a tortured soul who finds himself struggling unduly to cope with life's challenges. The internal torment and angst that dog him throughout his life and the tragic, ironic turns of events that overtake him as a young man are, to a great extent, the outworkings of his faulty upbringing. At the same time, they work together to drive home the novel's underlying theme: the illusory, undependable nature of the world in which we live and the call to seek, beyond the outward and the ephemeral, that which is inward and enduring. The narrative, full of pathos, draws the reader unwittingly into a vicarious experience of Kamilâs agonies and ecstasies. As such, it is a specimen of Mahfouz's prose at its finest.

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