Reviews

“This is a very important book which acquaints the reader with a highly gifted but still relatively unknown author, Naguib Mahfouz. It analyzes some of Mahfouz’s finest writings, it provides a valuable contribution to that body of extant scholarship, but most importantly, it gives voice to the many women whose stories have not been told, whose silence has been oppressive, and whose dignity has been shattered. … This is a monumental publication: it represents one of the first important critical studies of Mahfouz’s art—in itself a noteworthy achievement—but, beyond that, the author’s courageous and penetrating analysis of these women and their suffering is conceptualized and executed on a heroic plane. This is not an esoteric read, yet another would-be scholar’s arcane peregrination into obscurantism. Far from that, Naguib Mahfouz: A Western and Eastern Cage of Female Entrapment is vast in its scope, intellectually honest in its central premise, and revelatory in its findings. This is a book that matters; this is a book that offers the reader an astute and moving examination of one of the great if under-appreciated writers of the modern era.” – Professor Ronald G. Shafer, Indiana University of Pennsylvania