The narrator becomes a regular and gets to know Qurunfula and some of the other patrons, fitting right in.īut there's a change in atmosphere when he arrives one day: "only to find all the chairs normally occupied by the young people empty". Here you get to sense past and present in a warm embrace, the sweet past and glorious present. The narrator stumbles across the Karnak Café of the title and immediately finds it a sympathetic haven - not least because the proprietress is Qurunfula, "the roseate dream from the 1940s".Ī small oasis in the middle of the big city, it has just the right atmosphere: Karnak Café is a short novella set around - and marked by - the war of 1967 and everything that went with it in Egypt. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers.
His loving descriptions of the Karnak, with its passionate and enigmatic proprietress - every café worthy of the name must have a lady with a past - together with his selfeffacement before his characters, each of whom speaks in turn to the unnamed narrator, push the novel beyond simplistic categories." - Eric Ormsby, The New York Sun Although every page smolders with justified fury, Mahfouz was above mere denunciation. It exposes the dislocations suffered by a whole generation in the wake of what Arabs call al-Naksa (.) In other hands this novel might have become a tract.
Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.
0 kommentar(er)
