![]() ![]() Mahfouz recalls the various rooms and secret places in these novels, including the roof, which becomes a scene for family gatherings and the meetings of lovers. ![]() The family house, also, seems to have inspired Mahfouz and serves as the model for the Abd al-Jawad family house in The Cairo Trilogy. The alley of his childhood is a kind of microcosm of Egyptian society in his works. He spent his first nine or ten years in Gamaliya, which plays an important role in his earlier, realistic novels such as Midaq Alley and The Cairo Trilogy, and figures symbolically in later books like Children of the Alley and The Harafish. But his childhood was a happy one-the family was stable and loving, with religion playing a very important role in their life-and there are many signs of Mahfouz’s affection for his early childhood in his work. He mourned his lack of normal sibling bonds, which is reflected in the portrayal of fraternal relationships in much of his work. Although he had many siblings, Mahfouz felt like an only child because the next youngest brother was ten years older than him. Naguib Mahfouz was born on December 11, 1911, in the old Gamaliya quarter of Cairo, the youngest of seven children in a family of five boys and two girls. In 2011, the AUC Press celebrated the centenary of the Egyptian Nobel laureate’s birth. ![]()
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