Description

In the success of the Nobel-Prize for Literature and writer of the Cairo trilogy, comes Akhenaten, an amazing work of fiction concerning the many notorious pharaoh of historic Egypt.In this beguiling new novel, originally released in 1985 and now showing for the first amount of time in america, Mahfouz informs with remarkable understanding the tale of the "heretic pharaoh," or "sun king,"--and the first known monotheistic leader--whose iconoclastic and controversial rule throughout the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.) has uncanny resonance with contemporary sensibilities.   Narrating the novel is just a child with a love for the reality, who concerns the pharaoh's competitors after his terrible death--including Akhenaten's nearest buddies, his most bitter opponents, and lastly his enigmatic partner, Nefertiti--within an attempt to find out what actually happened in these unusual, dim times at Akhenaten's court.  As our narrator and each one of the subjects he interviews lead their edition of Akhenaten, "the reality" becomes progressively evanescent.  Akhenaten includes all the contradictions his subjects observe in him: at once vicious and empathic, female and crude, angry and divinely inspired, his personality, as Mahfouz thinks him, is strangely contemporary, and fascinatingly ethereal.  A formidable and extremely articulate and accessible guide, Akhenaten is just a function just Mahfouz Might make so elegantly, so irresistibly.