من المجموعة القصصية (الحب فوق هضبة الهرم)، من أجمل القصص القصيرة التي قرأتها في حياتي .. هكذا تكون الكتابة!

A short taste of short stories from Mahfouz from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I'm struck by The Haunted Woods, A Man of Awesome Power, and mostly Room No. 12, which I really want to discuss with someone. The jacket says supernatural stories and there are plenty of skeletons and ghosts and angels and spiritual guides to heaven. I find plenty of class, religion, and politics as well. These are fable/parables that are more accessible, political Borges stories to me.

Mahfouz is an amazing novelist, one of the greatest ever, so my complaint is not with him but with the way this compendium has been made. The selection of stories is not the best (with the exception of the first one), and I feel like some of them don't deliver on the "supernatural" claims of the title. Read Mahfouz's novels, a better experience.

my very first taste of the author. some of the tales left me stupefied. tak tercapai akalku. 'the seventh heaven' is the longest, and i liked it the most.

Awesome collection of stories. Hard to pick one personal favorite.

The Seventh Heaven: Supernatural Tales by Naguib Mahfouz (2006)

I had originally thought of giving two stars to this collection of short stories, but after further reflection realized that because of their sheer pointlessness and lack of imagination they had earned a single star. Even the headline short story, "They Seventh Heaven," which makes an attempt at a plot and some sort of meaning, is ultimately uninteresting. The author is not telling me something profound by putting the souls of historical figures into the bodies of common people and a feeble attempt at enigmaticness at its end simply comes off as shallow. And that would have been the high point of all of these stories.

Only one Nobel prize??

Awesome collection of stories. Hard to pick one personal favorite.

قصة فريدة ورائعة جدد نجيب فيها ثوبه تألق وألفها بتسلطن مذهل.. اسعدتني جدا وبهرتني ...