Reading now

By Naguib Mahfouz

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The thing I miss the most during this period of my life is direct reading and leafing through books. All my life I used to read voraciously, and I had a diverse range of interests from history to philosophy, from politics to psychology. But literature, especially poetry and the novel, always received the lion's share of my attention. I read all I could lay my hands on of the major novelists' work in translation. Some, like Anatole France and Dickens, I read in the original.

Now the condition of my eyes does not allow me to read, and I am indebted to my kind friends for any "reading" I undertake in terms of new writing and any news and reviews concerning the arts. They even convey to me the content of films, whose soundtracks I have difficulty hearing. My friends have become my only eyes and ears. For current affairs I depend wholly on haj Sabri, who reads me the papers for about an hour a day; when he is on holiday one of my daughters takes his place.

But in truth nothing compares to the pleasure of reading directly with my own eyes, to seeing a film or visiting an exhibition. It frequently happens that someone you trust will praise a work to the skies, but when you see that work you do not like it -- and vice versa. But what can I do?

Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.