Karnak Café

Resumen del libro

In this gripping and suspenseful novella from the Egyptian Nobel Prize-winner, three young friends survive interrogation by the secret police, only to find their lives poisoned by suspicion, fear, and betrayal.

At a Cairo café in the 1960s, a legendary former belly dancer lovingly presides over a boisterous family of regulars, including a group of idealistic university students. One day, amid reports of a wave of arrests, three of the students disappear: the excitable Hilmi, his friend Ismail, and Ismail's beautiful girlfriend Zaynab. When they return months later, they are apparently unharmed and yet subtly and profoundly changed. It is only years later, after their lives have been further shattered, that the narrator pieces together the young people's horrific stories and learns how the government used them against one another. In a riveting final chapter, their torturer himself enters the Café and sits among his former victims, claiming a right to join their society of the disillusioned. Now translated into English for the first time, Naguib Mahfouz's tale of the insidious effects of government-sanctioned torture and the suspension of rights and freedoms in a time of crisis is shockingly contemporary.

Biografía del autor

Naguib Mahfuz (1911x{0026} x02013;2006) nació en el histórico barrio cariota de al-Gamaliya, escenario de algunas de sus obras. Publicó su primera novela, ambientada en el Egipto de los faraones, en 1939, y desde entonces no dejó nunca de escribir. Considerado por la crítica como uno de los mejores escritores árabes de todos los tiempos, tras la obtención del Premio Nobel de Literatura en 1988 se convirtió en un autor muy admirado por los lectores occidentales. Todas sus obras se centran en la relación sentimental del escritor con la ciudad de El Cairo, sus barrios y sus cafés.