Written in the last decades of his life, I Found Myself…The Last Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz, presents itself, to use Edward Said’s terminology, as a most peculiar work of Late Style. Set to be published in May of 2025, this translation of Mahfouz’s dreams by Hisham Matar provides us with a provocative insight into a collection of writings that the author perhaps never intended to publish in his lifetime. Likewise, it behooves us as critics to understand this journal not as an organized reconciliation and resolution to Mahfouz’s career but as marked by the loss that defined his life after the attempt that was made on it by an assassin, and the ways in which he attempted to contend with not just the loss of his health and capacity to produce, but also his other dreams. It captures his yearning for democracy and for lost lovers, but above all, I think, his love of freedom. This, Matar argues, is manifest in the recurring figures of the founders of modern Egypt such as Saad Zaghloul, Mustafa Al-Nahass, and Jamal Abdel Nasser. One dream in particular finds Mahfouz in conversation with Nasser, warmly affirming their undying camaraderie. Outside of meditations on the failure of politics, however, there are also dreams about Mahfouz’s lost lover B, of the “Great Peanut Rebellion,” the Emperor of Japan, doctors, Mawlid, Egypt’s national soccer team, and a tea garden, amongst others. All the while, the reader’s immersion, supplemented by Mahfouz’s effortless vacillation between the formal and the intimate, is doubled by the interspersed photographic work of Diana Matar, whose pictures (which were taken contemporaneously with the journal’s dreams) provide us with a repertoire of Cairene life that undoubtedly colored Mahfouz’s unconscious.
Returning, then, to Said’s insight. If I may be so bold as to use this term, the essence of this work fits perfectly into what characterizes a work of late style: the holding of pleasure and disenchantment without feeling the need to resolve their contradiction, as well as the writer’s mature subjectivity. Simultaneously, it is peculiar insofar as we as readers are entirely unaware of if Mahfouz’s prosody here was reflective of a broader shift, or if it was truly just a liberated expression of his unconscious. In this sense, it would not be brazen to argue that I Found Myself is a work of late style par excellence, as Mahfouz demonstrates through these narrations of his unconscious mind that he is not only expressing late style, but that he has internalized it in a gesture of a kind of lifelong lateness. He moves seamlessly between different dimensions of translation, all while maintaining a sense of clarity and eloquence in a voice that is comfortable rather than compensatory. I Found Myself itself exists as a tripartite translation, with Mahfouz moving from his unconscious to his conscious, and from the voice of the diarist to that of the writer, with Matar completing the process with a translation from Arabic to English. Matar’s remarkable ability to capture all of these dimensions, without sacrificing the stylistic qualities of Mahfouz’s prose, is what makes this translation so masterful. Whether you are interested in Arabic literature, a fan of Mahfouz’s work, or simply an admirer of dreams, there is something in this collection for everyone. If for no other reason than afterwards, after being engrossed in page after page of Mahfouz’s quiet serenity, you will feel as though you have made a new friend.
– Amine Bit