On Naghib Mahfouz

Local novelist Pauls Toutonghi wrote in with his thoughts about the death of Nobel Prize winning author Naghib Mahfouz.

With the strange intimacy and speed of our new, wired world, I found out this morning that Naghib Mahfouz -- the 94-year old Egyptian novelist -- had died. I knew he was dead forty minutes after it happened. An email appeared in my inbox from CNN -- announcing that the world had lost another Nobel Laureate.

Every year seems tough on the arts but when you lose a favorite writer, at least for me, the impact is somehow greater. In the past few years I've lost two of my heroes: Naghib Mahfouz and Saul Bellow.

As a novelist, there's something secretive about your heroes. Unlike professional atheletes or politicians or rock stars, novelists are almost invisible. Their work comes to you in a quiet and unassuming form -- a book -- which sits on a library or bookstore shelf, waiting to be picked up. Books don't announce themselves brashly in the media (for the most part). When you discover a writer whose work you love it always feels -- at least it has felt for me -- a bit miraculous.

My dad was born in Egypt -- just a few miles from the part of Cairo that Mahfouz wrote about in his books. I felt like Midraq Alley -- and the house on Sugar Street -- were places cut from the scenes of his childhood.

Mahfouz was a man who created lively and entertaining characters in a political environment that was never friendly to his work. In 1959, his novel, Children of Gebelawi, was banned. In 1994, he was stabbed in the neck by a Muslim fundamentalist.

Over the next few weeks, Mahfouz will be eulogized endlessly -- everywhere in the world. The way that he died will be mentioned: Walking through Cairo at midnight on a warm July evening, he slipped and fell and hit his head on the pavement. After a month in the hospital, his body finally gave out, unable to recover.

But to me, it seems strangely fitting that a writer whose life -- and work -- was drawn from the streets of the Egyptian capital would die, essentially, because of these same streets. I'll miss his work; I've read his last four books as they were translated in English.

Mahfouz wrote: "The real malady is fear of life, not death." And this seems true to me.