Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz entitles his memoir, Echoes of an Autobiography, and very aptly so, because his autobiography is certainly nothing like the typical autobiography that one might pull off the shelf. "Echoes" is very much the key word here. Just as his novel Arabian Nights and Days was riddled with metaphors and mysteries, riddles and all things mystical, so is his autobiography.
A strange technique to employ indeed, as most of us expect such works of non-fiction as strictly categorized as "non-fiction" to be explicitly truthful. But Mahfouz likes to toy with the idea of truth as well as with the norms and structures of writing. His autobiography is a short collection of even shorter snippets- tidbits of wisdom, small vignettes that are almost parables or, rather, proverbs. They are never clearly explained and are certainly not stories that we can assume actually happened to Mahfouz in exactly the manner he describes them: some are far too fantastical than that. But each little story gives some vague, riddle-type piece of wisdom. One is not sure exactly what to take from the proverbs that make up Mahfouz's autobiography, and that is where the brilliance of it lies.
Mahfouz does not dictate his life to you, cut and dry, bland and straightforward. He gives it to you in a series of snapshots and allows the art to speak for itself, forces the reader to interpret his meanings. Never before have I seen a writer do this with his autobiography, but when looking at Arabian Nights and Days, it only makes sense, as that book too was not a whole story that that flowed from beginning to end but rather a collection of different peoples' stories, somewhat disjointed at times, somewhat confusing, even involving reincarnation at points, encounters with genies and sultans, mystical journeys. Nothing is explicit or clearly defined. It becomes obvious to the reader when reading Echoes of an Autobiography that this is just not Mahfouz's way. He would rather let his words speak for him, he would rather let his reader do some of the work, or indeed, almost all of the work, of interpretation.
One thing that it does seem safe to say is that Mahfouz is somewhat fixated on the theme of death, as it reoccurs all throughout his autobiography. Well, and why not? He was an older man at the time of its writing and the certainty that life will end in death and how that affects the life one leads has been a motif in both of the books we have read by him. One of his best "proverbs" spoke of him finding a rose with a note tied to it that read "Come, I shall be as you would like to find me." This proverb spoke to me more than any of the others, because I interpreted it as life speaking to Mahfouz. The proverb went on to sort of give Mahfouz a piece of wisdom- that life awaited him, and was his for the taking, that his legacy was whatever he would make it. He could leave any mark he chose on the city, but he had better do it if he desired, because someday he would be gone, dust and ashes. While he was alive, life would be whatever he made of it.
Perhaps this was not Mahfouz's meaning when he wrote that part of Echoes, but that's the beauty of it. I get to decide for myself what I feel like Mahfouz was trying to say to me, and most of the time, it is something pretty worthwhile.
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