THE TIME AND THE PLACE

Twenty short stories—selected by Mahfouz—from some 14 volumes published in Arabic between 1962 and 1988, the year he became a Nobel laureate: all but four, set mostly in a picturesque district of Cairo, appear in English for the first time. Many of the fictions deal with death-haunted denizens of the dark alleyways and lower-classes of Cairo. Some are realistic fables, foreshortened to emphasize the passage of time, while others tend toward Kafkaesque or Borgian fabulism. Of the former, "Half a Day" is a nostalgic re-creation of a morning walk to school—the first day in that school—and the afternoon walk home. Ordinary events are transposed to metaphor: "As our path revealed itself to us, however, we did not find it as totally sweet and unclouded as we had presumed." Early pieces like "Fear" and "The Wasteland" are bleak and fatalistic; in the latter, the narrator, defeated by time, heads "toward the wasteland." Meanwhile, "The Empty Cafe" sketches the loneliness of old age in the person of a man whose only friend is a grandson's cat. Of the modernist fables, "The Man and the Other Man" is a puzzler in which one reality merges with another; "Zaabalawi" is about a Godot-like search for Zaabalawi ("We used to regard him as a man of miracles..."); "The Time and the Place," in which Mahfouz conjures an Arabian Nights atmosphere, begins with "the gift of miracle" and ends with the protagonist in handcuffs for reasons that have little to do with individual guilt or innocence. In "The Norwegian Rat," a neighborhood scare over rats that are "even attacking cats and dogs" ends with a ravenous official becoming the human equivalent of the much-feared rodent. A magical-mystery sampler, then, of a most original writer.