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I wish you both well ccowie and desertblues, and your travels do always sound so interesting, desertblues.
I found the idea for a novel about Akhenaten and the construct of the story being told by various partial characters all very fascinating, however I found the execution lacking.
There could be something said for making most of the characters very obvious in their attitudes if one is imagining that the prevalence in that society was to be as such, but the author and the book in toto shouldn’t also come across that way, while Mahfouz and this book do.
Many characters were too similar, used phrasings too similar to each other and generally came off as unbelievable. It all came off as actually somewhat unintentionally childish, as if I were reading a fairy tale. Some of it may have to do with my knowing beforehand some things about Akhenaten’s time that made Mahfouz’s reconstruction of it seem at times false despite his own scholarship in the area (I’ve read somewhere that Mahfouz knew a lot about this history). Instead, I found it more of an historical Egyptian novel too influenced by modern Egyptian sensibilities.
Mahfouz was, in my opinion, also trying almost too hard to relate Akhenaten to Jesus or even perhaps Muhammad. I don’t know enough about Muhammad to spot the similarities, but certainly Mahfouz makes a case for Akhenaten to be a progenitor of the legend of Jesus, if one believed Jesus not to have been a real person. It could be possible that this was actually the case; however, I feel that Mahfouz was heavy-handed.
Overall I’m happy to have finally read something by Mahfouz, and actually think it’s not a bad book to read, despite some major flaws, since it’s short and makes one think and somewhat realistically puts one’s imagination into this specific obscure historical period. I also want to thank Hamlet for an excellent slate of selections this month! I’ve also added Burger’s Daughter to my “to read soon” list and am excited to read it.
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