Naguib Mahfouz: A Western and Eastern Cage of Female Entrapment ...

In short, this is a very important book: it acquaints the reader with a highly gifted but still relatively unknown author, it analyzes some of Mahfouz’s finest writings, it provides a valuable contribution to that body of extant scholarship, but—most importantly—it gives a voice to the many women whose stories have not been told, whose silence has been oppressive, and whose dignity has been shattered. Their stories are presented in Mahfouz’s works; they are poignantly critiqued in this book. Their lives are seen in bustling panorama in Mahfouz’s stories: they are foregrounded and even on occasion placed under the microscope by Allegretto-Diiulio. They are seen and appreciated in Mahfouz’s work; they are empathized with and loved in Allegretto-Diiulio’s work; she indelibly etches their vignettes, at times searing in their pathos, in our collective conscious.

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, Dr. Allegretto-DiIulio’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 underappreciated writers of the modern era.

Professor Ronald G. Shafer

Department of English Indiana University of Pennsylvania