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4.0étoiles sur 5
Description of conflicts within self and society, Nov. 29 2002
Set in Cairo in the early 1950s, this novel portrays the psychological torment of Omar, an ardent revolutionary in his youth who in middle age has been left behind by Nasser's 1952 Revolution. His conscience has died. As he struggles for psychological renewal, he gives up his work and his family to a series of love affairs, which simply increase his alienation from himself and from the rest of the world. In The Beggar, the lawyer Omar seems confined in his uneventful life. The doctors are helpless; as he seems in good health, but he is being eaten away by anxiety and a feeling of futility. As a way of escape, he sets out to experience everything that goes against norms of respectable married life, he in hope of discovering his illness; looses himself in himself in licentiousness and sexual pleasure . However, his nightly adventures themselves disappear in the morning light, and he remains absent to the world. He wishes to be in the heart of a lover -- he seems to have become a dead man among the living. Even when he meets his old friend the militant leftist Osman Khalil as the latter leaves prison, he cannot find himself again. He admires the energy of his friend, whose militant ardour years in prison have done nothing to cool, but he, Omar El-Hamzaoui, is undermined from within, like a body that has neither natural impulses nor desire. A dead beggar among the living, he now calls upon death to give him a taste for living again and the feeling that he belongs in the world. The value of The Beggar does not lie in the dialogue it contains about the superiority of science over art in the technological age, which is a theme that is in any case exhausted. Instead, it lies in the fact that this novel introduced the Arab reader to the opposition between nihilism, or a life without horizons, and the belief that the world and society are open to change. In this novel, the latter belief is no longer tenable, being neither as full nor as positive as reforming discourse would have it be. Instead, the 1960s citizen has discovered his insignificance in the face of the nationalist State's repressive machinery. Not even free to be himself, he is forced into evasion, silence and the silencing of his conscience.
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