About the book: year / "The Epic of the Kharafish" is a novel by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006; Nobel Prize 1988), published in 1977, which tells the story of ten stories about generations of a family inhabiting the Egyptian quarter at no particular time or place (however, it is believed to have been in Husseiniya, that is, in the Hussein quarter at the beginning of Alawite rule in Egypt). Naguib Mahfouz's novel talks about the philosophy of government, the succession of clan rulers and the role of the common people. The novel does not deviate much from the existentialist approach that Naguib Mahfouz used in many of his works, despite its social nature (one of the characters seeks immortality after being overcome by sudden death...) The events, details and characters of the novel branch out both in the mind of the reader, and under the writer’s pen, instilling many ideas and resulting in the idea of ​​repeating the fate of generations, the loss of origins. from one generation of clan members to the next. Religion is also present in the novel, as impulses of the soul that a person cannot expel from his body, despite rebelling against them. This is a novel that collects the whole life, covers all the cliches and generously lists most of the values. The novel is filled with verses of Persian poetry by Hafiz, which the author used as a symbol of the unknown, in which human souls wander, and the stories of the novel follow each other, and they have everything: strength and weakness, good and evil, hope and despair.