The Thief and the Dogs

Product DescriptionNaguib Mahfouzs haunting novella of postrevolutionary Egypt combines a vivid pychological portrait of an anguished man with the suspense and rapid pace of a detective story.After four years in prison, the skilled young thief Said Mahran emerges bent on revenge. He finds a world that has changed in more ways than one. Egypt has undergone a revolution and, on a more personal level, his beloved wife and his trusted henchman, who conspired to betray him to the police, are now married to each other and are keeping his sixyearold daughter from him. But in the most bitter betrayal, his mentor, Rauf Ilwan, once a firebrand revolutionary who convinced Said that stealing from the rich in a unjust society is an act of justice, is now himself a rich man, a respected newspaper editor who wants nothing to do with the disgraced Said. As Saids wild attempts to achieve his idea of justice badly misfire, he becomes a hunted man so driven by hatred that he can only recognize too late his last chance at redemption.ReviewThe incredible variety of Mahfouzs writing continues to dazzle our eyes. The Washington Post[Naguib Mahfouz] is not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, a Mann, a Zola, and a Jules Romains. Edward Said, The London Review of BooksThe greatest writer in one of the most widely understood languages in the world, a storyteller of the first order in any idiom. Vanity FairA Dickens of the Cairo cafes. NewsweekNaguib Mahfouz virtually invented the novel as an Arab form. He excels at fusing deep emotion and soap opera. The New York Times Book ReviewMahfouzs work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical. The Nobel Prize acknowledges the universal significance of his fiction. Los Angeles Times Book ReviewAbout the AuthorNaguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. His nearly forty novels and hundreds of short stories range from reimaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. Of his many works, most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations, from 1917 until 1952. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in August 2006.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.ONEOnce more he breathed the air of freedom. But there was stifling dust in the air, almost unbearable heat, and no one was waiting for him; nothing but his blue suit and gym shoes.As the prison gate and its unconfessable miseries receded, the worldstreets belabored by the sun, careening cars, crowds of people moving or stillreturned.No one smiled or seemed happy. But who of these people could have suffered more than he had, with four years lost, taken from him by betrayal? And the hour was coming when he would confront them, when his rage would explode and burn, when those who had betrayed him would despair unto death, when treachery would pay for what it had done.Nabawiyya. Ilish. Your two names merge in my mind. For years you will have been thinking about this day, never imagining, all the while, that the gates would ever actually open. Youll be watching now, but I wont fall into the trap. At the right moment, instead, Ill strike like Fate.And Sana? What about Sana?As the thought of her crossed his mind, the heat and the dust, the hatred and pain all disappeared, leaving only love to glow across a soul as clear as a rainwashed sky.I wonder how much the little one even knows about her father? Nothing, I suppose. No more than this road does, these passersby or this molten air.She had never been out of his thoughts, where bit by bit shed taken shape, like an image in a dream, for four long years. Would luck now give him some decent place to live, where such love could be equally shared, where he could take jo