From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of
the Cairo Trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of
fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.
In this beguiling
novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz tells with
extraordinary insight the story of the “heretic pharaoh,” or “sun
king,”–the first known monotheistic ruler–whose iconoclastic
and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has
uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is
a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh’s
contemporaries after his horrible death–including Akhenaten’s
closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic
wife, Nefertiti–in an effort to discover what really happened in
those strange, dark days at Akhenaten’s
court. As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews
contribute their version of Akhenaten,
“the truth” becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten
encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at
once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely
inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern,
and fascinatingly ethereal. An ambitious and exceptionally lucid and
accessible book, Akhenaten is a work only Mahfouz could render
so elegantly, so irresistibly.