Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab winner of the Nobel prize for literature* (in 1987), died in Cairo yesterday.

I came upon his body of work, very indirectly, via his book of non-fiction, Echoes of an Autobiography", an elliptical and spare take, via brief (half page or so) meditations on his life as a writer, as a spiritual seeker, and other sundry topics that a human being living in a world might find fascinating as well as puzzling at the same time. After this I read his well know Cairo Triology, with its pampliset of middle class characters set in a slice of pre-colonial Cairo geography but in a way mirroring the larger world.

It is, perhaps, because of Mahfouz age, and the way I stumbled upon his work that for some reason he has come to sit at the writers table in my mind adjacent of the other grand fatherly figure, R.K. Narayan; a more tortured "The English Teacher" kind of Narayan. For a more learned look at Mahfouz's work, take a look at this Edward Said's essay (a variant of which also appeared in the New York Review of Books).

I guess it is time for me to take down the Cario Trilogy, and vanish into the alleys, the bazars, and the coffeehouses cut from the lines of Mahfouz.

*This choice wasn't without its critics and ironies. It was partly attributed to the Arab-Israeli peace manoeuvrings at that time even though the Arab establishment was suspicious of Mahfouz's western leanings. And at the same time, the more radical Arab elements have claimed that Mahfouz got the prize only because he was an apologist for the Egyptian dicatatorship (by not speaking out againt it, and for being employed by the Egyptian goverment); thus making him a safe "Arab" choice vs. say the more stringent voices such as the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis or the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Mahfouz also survived a deadly knifing by a religious radical after he got the prize.