{"product_id":"cairo-modern-book-naguib-mahfouz-9780307473530","title":"Cairo Modern","description":"The novelist's camera pans from the dome of King Fuad University (now Cairo University) to students streaming out of the campus, focusing on four students in their twenties, each representing a different trend in Egypt in the 1930s. Finally the camera comes to rest on Mahgub Abd al-Da'im. A scamp, he fancies himself a nihilist, a hedonist, an egotist, but his personal vulnerability is soon revealed by a family crisis back home in al-Qanatir, a dusty, provincial town on the Nile that is also a popular destination for Cairene day-trippers. Mahgub, like many characters in works by Naguib Mahfouz, has a hard time finding the correct setting on his ambition gauge. His emotional life also fluctuates between the extremes of a street girl, who makes her living gathering cigarette butts, and his wealthy cousin Tahiya. Since he thinks that virtue is merely a social construct, how far will our would-be nihilist go in trying to fulfill his unbridled ambitions? What if he discovers that high society is more corrupt and cynical than he is? With a wink back at Goethe's Faust and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Mahgub becomes a willing collaborator in his own corruption. Published in Arabic in the 1940s, this cautionary morality tale about self-defeating egoism and ill-digested foreign philosophies comes from the same period as one of the writer's best known works, Midaq Alley. Both novels are comic and heart-felt indictments not so much of Egyptian society between the world wars as of human nature and our paltry attempts to establish just societies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49570351710481,"sku":"GOR009105344","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50306257813777,"sku":"CIN0307473538VG","price":4.08,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50348365775121,"sku":"CIN0307473538G","price":5.91,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000765251857,"sku":"NIN9780307473530","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52126430232849,"sku":"NLS9780307473530","price":22.59,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0307473538.jpg?v=1750780866","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/cairo-modern-book-naguib-mahfouz-9780307473530","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}