I Found Myself: Last Dreams

by Naguib Mahfouz, Hisham Matar (Translator), Hisham Matar (Introduction), Diana Matar (Photographer)

Overview

I Found Myself: Last Dreams confirms again the richness and variety of Mahfouz's storytelling—"the single most important writer in modern Arabic literature" (Newsweek)

I found myself in our old house in El Abbassiya, visiting my mother. She received me with perplexing indifference and then left the room. I assumed she’d gone to make coffee, but she never returned. [Dream 216]  

In his final years, the Egyptian master storyteller and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz drew on his dreams, combining the mystery of what we experience in the night with the deep wells of his narrative art. These last dreams, stunning poetic vignettes—now brought beautifully into English for the first time by the acclaimed novelist Hisham Matar—appear here with dreamlike photographs by the famous American photographer Diana Matar, which both mysteriously rhyme with Mahfouz’s nocturnal reveries and, allowing the reader a chance to dream in turn, open up the texts. These sketches and stories are tersely haunting miniatures.  Recurring female characters may be figures of Cairo herself, especially one much-missed lover from Mahfouz’s youth.  Friends, family, rulers of Egypt, and many beautiful women all float through these affecting brief tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in slumber. A tender and personal introduction by Hisham Matar, recollecting how he and his wife met Mahfouz in Cairo not long after the assassination attempt on the author, is moving and likewise indelible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811231022
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. Of his nearly forty novels, the most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in August 2006.

Editorial Reviews

"Sad, strange, comic (often all at once), these mosaic shards build into an elusive pattern… Something in them resists translation from night into day, just as Diana Matar’s intriguingly shaded, cropped and angled photos tempt us with the promise of a narrative — and deny it. We learn that private experience, asleep or awake, will always escape its interpretations. Both words and images guard their mystery."

Financial Times - Boyd Tonkin

"A master of both detailed realism and fabulous storytelling."

The Guardian

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

Kirkus (starred review)

"Mahfouz's work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical."

The Los Angeles Times

"Mahfouz is a storyteller of the first order in any idiom."

Vanity Fair

"The Arab world's foremost novelist."

The New York Times

"The incredible variety of Naguib Mahfouz's writings continues to dazzle our eyes."

The Washington Post

"Mahfouz's work is freshly nuanced and hauntingly lyrical. The Nobel Prize acknowledges the universal significance of his fiction."

Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A dream journal kept by Egyptian Nobel laureate Mahfouz in the last years of his life reveals poetry and mystery in brief, enigmatic bursts… As suggested in the introduction by Hisham Matar and underscored by evocative photographs by Diana Matar, the more constant presence throughout this book may be the city of Cairo."

Booklist - Brendan Driscoll

"A towering literary figure."

The Economist

★ 2025-03-22
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.

Kirkus Reviews