The Prison of Life: An Autobiographical Essay

Tawfiq al-Hakim, born probably in 1899, was, with such writters as Naguib Mahfouz and Taha Hussein, one of the great formative figures of twentieth-century Egyptian literature. Immensly prolific and versatile, he was the first Arab to acquire a literary reputation as a dramatist, and was the author of more than seventy plays of remarkable variety, as well as of a number of novels, short stories, and essays. He died in 1987.This autobiographical essay, written in the simple and direct style leavened with humor for which Tawfiq al-Hakim is justly renowned, covers the early part of his iife until the mid-1930s. It represents an attempt by the author to understand himself, largely in terms of his genetic inheritance. Some readers may sense that at the heart of his relationship with his father was a demon he ultimately feared to face, but his candor produces a number of touching self-revelations. Even more substantial is the all too rare witness to the character of family and social relations in Egypt in the first quarter of the twentieth century. But most arresting and valuable of all are the author's reminiscences about the Egyptian theater in the 1920s and 1930s, providing for the historian of Arabic literature a mine of firsthand information.