Akhenaten by Naguib Mahfouz

Akhenaten by Naguib Mahfouz

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.

In this beguiling  novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"--the first known monotheistic ruler--whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities.  Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh's contemporaries after his horrible death--including Akhenaten's closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti--in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten's court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, "the truth" becomes increasingly evanescent.  Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal.  An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render so elegantly, so irresistibly.

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was born in Gamaliya, a busy Cairo neighborhood. He penned approximately 40 novels, as well as hundreds of short stories and screenplays. In 1988, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kay Heikkinen earned her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University, where she initially developed an interest in Arabic history, language, and literature. She has taught medieval history and literature, as well as Islamic civilization, at the University of Chicago, where she presently teaches Arabic.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385499095
ISBN 10	0385499094
Title	Akhenaten
Author	Naguib Mahfouz
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc
Year published	2000-04-04
Number of pages	176
Prizes	Winner of New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age., Winner of Nobel Prize.
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.