By Mursi Saad El-Din The book I am presenting has the nature of an academic thesis. It is a research into the sources of one of our leading novelists, Naguib Mahfouz, the influences have affected his works. Naguib Mahfouz is the best known novelist in modern Arabic literature. The author, Dr Hilana Sourial, is trying to trace the influence of European writers on Mahfouz, but more specifically to compare him to the famous French writer Marcel Proust. She begins by giving us the details of Mahfouz's life. He was born in 1912, in the district of Gamalya, one of the old quarters of Cairo, which, later became the scene of many Mahfouz's novels. At the age of six he left that district and went with his parents to live in Abbasseya, while again we find in some of his novels like Autumn Quail. Naguib Mahfouz studied philosophy at Cairo University, which was then Fouad I University, and received his BA in 1934. While he was still studying, in 1932 to be exact, Mahfouz translated and published an English book entitled Ancient Egypt, which inspired two of his earliest novels. From 1945 to 1947, Naguib Mahfouz published a series of what the author calls realistic novels. In 1957 he was given the State Prize for Literature. From 1961, Mahfouz's novels took a new turn, and his realism took on philosophical and psychological depth in The Thief and the Dogs (1961), for example. In a chapter entitled "Resemblance and Influence", the author claims that Mahfouz was influenced by a number of foreign writers, especially Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoi and Dostoievsky. In fact Mahfouz himself, in an interview in one of the Egyptian newspapers, admits that all those writers and authors inspired him with methods and ideas. It is a fact that Mahfouz read the works of those writers in French, a language he knew well. The author goes on to compare the lives of the two great writers. She finds similarities between their childhoods, their health conditions, their temperament, their education and their philosophy. The two novelists had a very sweet childhood, thanks to the tenderness of their mothers. Both of them were attached to their mothers; in fact they were passionately in love with them. That love manifested itself in that Proust's letters were mainly concerned with his mother's illness. Mahfouz, on the other hand, admits this love in an interview and it is clearly reflected in his novels. All the mothers in his books, even Bassima Omran, the prostitute in his novel The Road, are raised on a pedestal and worshipped. His characters, however hard and tough they may be, show their love for their mothers and cry hard when they die. The death of a mother in Mahfouz's novels is always an event narrated with grief. Both Proust and Mahfouz show a poetic strain and great sensitivity in their writings, and they are similar in their education since both studied philosophy and loved psychology, which yields a profound affinity in their idea of life and their beliefs. Mahfouz was also greatly affected by Proust's A La Recherche du temps perdu. Time is a constant character in his novels of Mahfouz. All his character are preoccupied with time. In The Thief and the Dogs, for example, the protagonist Said Mahran, on coming out of prison, wants to see what time has made of his girlfriend Nour. Time is capable of transforming everything: love to hate, beauty to ugliness, loyalty and disloyalty. Even people's principals are transformed by time; a young and poor socialist becomes a thug. One of Mahfouz's characters says, "Listen with me to time. It says everything to us". With Mahfouz as with Proust, the change is often complete. As a result of this all the characters of Mahfouz and Proust feel the passage of time and suffer as a result. When time attacks the characters it tends to ruin them. The reader cannot but notice the great differences in Mahfouz's characters, at the beginning of the novels and at the end.
