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| Love in the Rain
ISBN: 9781617973192
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / American University in Cairo Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Arabic fiction; Title;
A vibrant novel of memorable characters who search for happiness and true love, cope with the bitterness that results from love's betrayal, and embrace new beginnings.Set in Cairo in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967, Love in the Rain introduces us to an assortment of characters who, each in his or her own way, experience the effects of this calamitous event. The war and its casualties, as well as people's foibles and the tragedies they create for themselves, raise existential questions that cannot easily be answered.In a frank, sensitive treatment of everything from patriotism to prostitution, homosexuality and lesbianism, Love in the Rain presents a struggle between "old" and "new" in the realm of moral values that leaves the future in doubt. Through the dilemmas and heartbreaks faced by his protagonists, Mahfouz exposes the hypocrisy of those who condemn any breach of sexual morality while turning a blind eye to violence, corruption, and oppression, double standards as applied to men's and women's sexuality, and the folly of an exclusive focus on sexual morals without reference to other aspects of human character.
Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo, Egypt on December 11, 1911. He received a degree in philosophy from the University of Cairo. He took on several civil service and government department jobs to supplement his income while writing, but retired from that career in 1971. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 30 novels including The Games of Fate, The Cairo Trilogy, Children of Gebelawi, The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail, Small Talk on the Nile, and Miramar. He received numerous awards including the Egyptian State Prize, the Presidential Medal from the American University in Cairo, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He died as a result of a head injury on August 30, 2006 at the age of 94. (Bowker Author Biography) |
