Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth a Novel (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780385499095)

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.

Author: Naguib Mahfouz
ISBN-10: 0385499094
ISBN-13: 9780385499095
Publisher: Anchor Books
Language: English
Published: 04/04/2000
Pages: 176
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.10w x 0.60d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/07/2000 pg. 62
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2000 pg. 335
Booklist 03/15/2000 pg. 1328