Mahfouz is a Nobel Prize winner, and apparently a father-figure in contemporary Egyptian literature, whose Cairo Trilogy has recently aroused much interest in the West. This is a difficult book to describe - nominally a sort of re-write of a classic, or parts of it, in the light of contemporary sensibility, but as one English critic has phrased it, "really a series of politico-religious fables".
Autocracy, lust, bribery and police corruption are among the targets, and Aladdin, the Sultan Shahriyar and other traditional characters move rather strangely amid this almost surreal, absurdist world.
