/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}

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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Naguib Mahfouz ~ "Palace Walk"

_Translated by
William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny_

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This first volume in the 1988 Nobel Prize winner's "Cairo Trilogy" describes the disintegrating family life of a tyrannical, prosperous merchant, his timid wife and their rebellious children in post-WW I Egypt. "Mahfouz is a master at building up dramatic scenes and at portraying complex characters in depth," lauded PW.

This extraordinary novel provides a close look into Cairo society at the end of World War I. Mahfouz's vehicle for this examination is the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad, a middle-class merchant who runs his family strictly according to the Qur'an and directs his own behavior according to his desires. Consequently, while his wife and two daughters remain cloistered at home, and his three sons live in fear of his harsh will, al-Sayyid Ahmad nightly explores the pleasures of Cairo. Written by the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize, "Palace Walk" begins Mahfouz's highly acclaimed "Cairo Trilogy," which follows Egypt's development from 1917 to nationalism and Nasser in the 1950s. This novel's enchanting style and sweeping social tapestry ensure a large audience...

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A Digital or Virtual LIBRARY comprising of Free "eBooks" ~ Articles ~ Discussions ~ Posts ~ Links ~ Photos ~ Videos about "AUTEUR" Films ~ FICTION ~ Poetry ~ Arts & Literature ~ Theatre ~ Philosophy ~ Psychology ~ Music ~ Science ~ Culture etc.

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Interests: Schizophrenia, Metaphysics, Existentialism, Autism... Andrzej Tarkovsky... Ingmar Bergman... Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera... M.D. Ramanathan, Kumar Gandharva... J.S. Bach, Wagner...

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}

~ The {Title} is taken from Borges' {The Library at Babel} ~

Borges' "The Library at Babel" is a story that encompasses a world. The world that is a library, a library that is a universe broken into endless hexagons connected by stairs and hallways. It's unlike any library that has ever existed, a library of the mind, a virtual library, and as such the source of imaginative illustration. I've encountered pictures of its hexagonal galleries and infinite air shafts on Web Sites, and recently the story was re-published in hardcover with engravings by Erik Desmazieres, who gave the Library's interior a spooky look that I associate with the interiors of Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction. Many, of course, would choose to interpret the story in a more philosophical manner. Certainly a case can be made to see the story as a parable about man's search for God, or man's essential ignorance of the world, or of the chaos of the universe. While I acknowledge the story's visual and philosophical qualities, it has a personal connection. It evokes what I would call the large-library experience. Borges' nameless librarian, an administrator of some minor sort - if the library is infinite, all administrators are minor - recollects, "Like all men of the library, I have traveled in my youth, I have wandered in search of a book." Reading this, I think of my own rambles through stacks and shelves both as a student and an unattached "scholar." I've wandered through libraries looking for or just at books, feeling their collective weight, reading titles, puzzling at the cipher of numbers and letters by which they are classified. I have been lost in corridors of books like one drifting through the pinched streets of some foreign town, though indeed these rambles have taken part in and around my home. Books as realia have been part of this attraction. Strolling between shelves of bound volumes, I feel I'm pressed between the scales of some vast and dormant beast. Opened, each book presents a small bracket of hard space and distilled experience that, when joined in imagination with other books, create the sensation of time congealed. Books in vast quantities form a reality greater than the sum of their parts. Unlike museums, whether of science or art, that enfold me in a history of eras and schools and "movements," large libraries point beyond their realia. They go from the tangible to the intangible, from the temporal to the timeless, from the momentary to the eternal. Masses of books suggest the infinite. - Garrett Rowlan