BOOKPATHS

The Cavafy Museum, Alexandria, Egypt

The life and work of Greek poet Constatine P. Cavafy is celebrated at The Cavafy Museum in Alexandria, housed in the apartment where he spent the last 35 years of his life.  The Cavafy Museum website offers visitor information, along with a selection of his work.

In the Same Space
By C. P. Cavafy

The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood
that I’ve seen and walked through years on
   end:

I created you while I was happy, while I was
   sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.

And, for me, the whole of you has been
   transformed into feeling.

Related Website

Online -- Constantine P. Cavafy’s Poems (English)

Alexandria, Egypt

Peter Porter writes about Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria.

“It had not been Durrell’s original intention to carry the story over so long a span, but once begun, he found he had an irresistible impulse to complete the full trajectory of a long-fostered obsession. Alexandria became the mise en scène of his masterpiece, if not by accident, at least fortuitously. To state this is not to question the powerful presence of the city throughout the novels. But Durrell’s creative instinct appears to have hit on Alexandria as the right domain for his long-anticipated magnum opus because it had become highly familiar to him during his wartime exile and, more importantly, because an Alexandrian woman had entered his life at a critical point.” – from “Lawrence Durrell in the Ambiguous White Metropolis,” by Peter Porter, The Times

Egypt

Maya Jaggi talks with Egyptian novelist (and dentist) Alaa Al Aswany.

“Al Aswany, now 51, lives in Garden City, just south of downtown Cairo, with his wife, Iman Taymur, and their two daughters, May, 12, and Nada, 11. Speaking in a hotel beside the Nile, and later in London, he says he is unwilling to give up his clinic, despite being a rarity among Arabic novelists in being able to live from his writing (Mahfouz was a government bureaucrat). ‘Dentistry is my window on Egyptian society,' he says. 'Success can be dangerous - you get isolated. But if you block your contact with the street, you're in trouble. More than 60% of Egyptians are below the poverty line. I must keep loyal to them, or I'll lose everything.’" – from “Cairo Calling,” by Maya Jaggi, The Guardian

Farringford Hotel, Isle of Wight, England

Once the Isle of Wight home of Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), Farringford now caters to visitors as a hotel and restaurant “set in 33 acres of parkland and adjoining 500 acres of National Trust downland and breathtakingly beautiful coastline.”  Alfred Tennyson and his wife, Emily, first rented Farringford in 1853 “with the right to purchase, which they did in 1856 on the proceeds of the publication of Maud."  Farringford was Tennyson’s home for the next forty years, “the happiest period” of his life.  It was here that Tennyson wrote many of his most famous works, including The Charge of the Light Brigade; his second son was born; and where guests, such as Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Charles Darwin, were entertained.

For visitor information, visit Farringford’s website.

Egypt

Bryan Appleyard talks with Alaa Al Aswany whose novel, The Yacoubian Building, “is the biggest-selling novel in Arabic and is now red-hot in 17 other languages."

“The stories in his novel are beautifully, simply told; the characters are alive from page one. He is a writer who likes to feel his creations really do have lives of their own. ‘The most important moment is when I lose control of my characters. I lose control of them in the middle of this book. When the old man got married to the young girl — I did not decide to do this. I was thinking about them when I went to bed, and the next morning I opened my laptop and realised they were going to get married. I was very happy for them!’” – from “A Very Egyptian Delight,” by Bryan Appleyard, The Times

Egypt

Naguib Mahfouz died at his home in Cairo at age 94. Mahfouz, “the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature,” is remembered in the Guardian and the New York Times.

“Over the course of 50 novels, five plays and a score of short stories and essays, Mahfouz depicted life in Egypt, balanced between tradition and the modern world, with startling realism.” – from “First Arab Nobel Laureate Dies, Aged 94,” The Guardian

“Mr. Mahfouz, a slender, modest, shy man who once described himself as ‘a fourth- or fifth-class writer,’’ was often called the Egyptian Balzac for his vivid frescoes of Cairenes and their social, political and religious dilemmas. Critics compared his richly detailed Cairo with the London of Charles Dickens, the Paris of Émile Zola and the St. Petersburg of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.” – from “Naguib Mahfouz, First Writer in Arabic to Win Nobel Prize, Dies at 94,” by Robert D. McFadden, New York Times