نجيب محفوظ

محفوظ، نجيب

Pension Miramar engages a fellaha (a young peasant woman), who ran away from her village to avoid a forced marriage. She becomes the centre point of the attention of all the pension's inhabitants, because of her simplicity and natural beauty, but also for her ambition to get out of her traditional role of maid without education. The fellaha's battle to escape her humble fortune is mingled with her emotional love life and the more or less violent advances of some residents. The evolving story is told from (here) four different angles (persons), revealing slowly the real motives behind the different clashes. This novel contains some typical Mahfouz characters, like the career man, the wealthy playboy or the impostor ('employed by one master, serving secretly another'). Some themes are also familiar: 'If you have power, you have everything', or 'Everyone else around us behaves as if they didn't believe in God's existence'. The novel is also a reflection on the failure of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952: 'But was there an alternative? Only the Communists or the Muslim Brotherhood.'

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