Revolution and Cien años de soledad in Naguib Mahfouz's Layālī alf laylah

Abstract

Abstract This article compares two important political novels of the second half of the twentieth century: the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967) (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz's Layālī alf laylah (1982) (Arabian Nights and Days). Mahfouz's Layālī alf laylah, a modern Arab adaptation of The Thousand and One Nights, offers, I argue, a reworking of the style of magical realism popularized by García Márquez in his masterwork Cien años de soledad. Examining Mahfouz's inspiration by García Márquez's Cien años de soledad reveals a connection between two world literatures that reflects the importance of other, non-Western literature to Arab writers. A reading of Mahfouz's novel through the influence of García Márquez's Cien años de soledad provides an understanding of some of the literary connections between Latin American and Arabic literatures by focusing on García Márquez's mythologizing of Latin American history and Mahfouz's allegory of Egyptian politics in the 1970s.