Mary's Maze

Author's name: Mansoura Ezz El-Din

This novel continues the narrative approach developed by Mansoura Ezz El-Din in her first collection of short stories, in which the dividing line between dream and reality, between illusion and truth, between the imaginary and the lived, all of which represent multiple, even complementary, facets of her experience, is erased. But here, this approach acquires a unique dimension that makes it one of the novels of the new generation of female writers most preoccupied with what I have called the existential or ontological obsession, in which the heroine re-examines the details of her life in order to discover her identity or comprehend the truth of her personal history. "Maryam's Labyrinth" addresses issues that are very central to the experience of modernity in a large city like Cairo: isolation, pollution, bureaucracy, and madness. Waking up like Kafka's hero, Gregor Samsa, in a world she can no longer recognize, Maryam struggles to regain any resemblance to her previous life.