Miramar

Rating:
Summary: A Nostalgic Recollection
Review: A writer at the end of his prime visits Alexandria for a restful break. As he sits in an easy chair in a pension run by his
old friend, he sees two worlds juxtaposed: in the first he recalls his own past, his heady days of idealism and political
activisim; in the second he examines his life against those of the other, younger, guests at the pension. He tries to
reconcile his own views and visions and dreams with those that he sees around him. Touched with a despairing sense
of terminal nostaligia, he manages to re-examine his own life in its entire context -- and still be able to smile.

Rating:
Summary: What a plot and so many twists too-----Brilliant
Review: It was a fascinating read. The place,the time and the characters-- only mahfouz can write a book this way

Rating:
Summary: Excellent.
Review: No one, but Naguib Mahfouz can depict internal pain and human struggles with such elegance.

Rating:
Summary: An Egyptian Rashomon
Review: Pension Miramar engages a fellaha (a young peasant woman), who ran away from her village to avoid a forced marriage.
She becomes the centre point of the attention of all the pension's inhabitants, because of her simplicity and natural beauty, but also for her ambition to get out of her traditional role of maid without education. The fellaha's battle to escape her humble fortune is mingled with her emotional love life and the more or less violent advances of some residents.

Like Kurosawa in his magisterial movie 'Rashomon' (based on a short novel by Ryunosuke Akutagawa), the evolving story is told from (here) four different angles (persons), revealing slowly the real motives behind the different clashes.

This novel contains some typical Mahfouz characters, like the career man, the wealthy playboy or the impostor ('employed by one master, serving secretly another').
Some themes are also familiar: 'If you have power, you have everything', or 'Everyone else around us behaves as if they didn't believe in God's existence'.
The novel is also a reflection on the failure of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952: 'But was there an alternative? Only the Communists or the Muslim Brotherhood.'

This is surely a worth-while read, but the book has not quite the finesse of its Japanese example.