PHAIDRA – Digital collections

Inspired by the true story of a friend of the author, this novel unfolds between Cairo and Paris.
Although the core of the novel is narrated by the autobiographi-cal voice of a young Azharite, the text includes several pieces of the vivid cor-respondence between him and the whimsy ‘Adīb’, this fictitious name literally meaning the ‘Belletrist’. Adīb is portrayed as a man in his thirties who is “con-sumed by the ailment of literature” and by the yearning of leaving Egypt and going to Europe to accomplish his education. Once he obtains a scholarship to study in Paris, he is caught in a moral dilemma: the scholarship is reserved for bachelors, while he is married with a lady from his own village. Adīb finds himself torn between the deep love for the countryside he grew up in, for his world and for his roots and the perspective of traveling. The desperate struggle to reconcile his soul leads him to ‘divorce’ his wife – and with her his past and his roots – and to escape in a dangerous, and eventually delirious, identification with France and the city of Paris. In its carefully crafted pseudo-autobiographical narrative, Adīb is the account of an intense friendship and of a failed mediation, and stands as a complex metaphor of a recurrent experience of what was perceived as “mo-dernity” in the Arab world of the early twentieth century.