I FOUND MYSELF

Vignettes recounting the author’s ethereal dreams of old age, many centering on death and roads not taken.

Translator Matar, a Libyan novelist, met Mahfouz not long after a would-be killer attacked the Nobel Prize–winning author in a Cairo alley, nearly stabbing him to death. Mahfouz recovered, but he seldom ventured out in public again, at least not alone. Before his death in 2006, he recorded dreams that, writes Matar, “are an insight into Mahfouz’s twilight concerns.” In one, Mahfouz dreams that he has been walking along a road when an open window reveals a woman whom he immediately recognizes, though 50 years had robbed her of her beauty. “In the morning,” he writes, “I was deeply unsettled when, reading the newspaper, I came upon her obituary. I was profoundly saddened and wondered which of us had visited the other at that hour of death?” In another dream—and almost all of these vignettes begin “I found myself” or “I saw myself”—he encounters his long-dead mother, who “received [him] with perplexing indifference and then left the room.” Let the oneirologists make of that what they will, but it all makes eminent sense: One door is closing, another is opening. Other of Mahfouz’s dreams point to his political opposition to numerous Egyptian regimes: In one he finds himself in a train station with two areas, one quiet and conducive to work, the other noisy and full of sights and smells. When Mahfouz prefers the first, his companion says, “Yes, but I spotted some of our opponents in the other section,” to which Mahfouz replies, “I am ready for a confrontation.” So, as ever, he is, though always with humane intent, honoring what a different companion tells him in another dream: “One must, as long as we are alive, retain some good faith.”

Elegant, often haunting evocations of a lost world at the end of life.