Whisper of Madness

Author's name: Naguib Mahfouz

Whispers of Madness by Naguib Mahfouz... "What is madness? It seems to be a mysterious state like life and death. You can know a lot about it if you look at it from the outside, but the interior, the essence, is a closed secret. And here he now knows that he was a guest for some time in Khanka. He remembers, now too, his past life as all sane people remember it, and as he knows his present. As for that short period, short it was, thank God, his consciousness stands before its memories, astonished and confused, not knowing anything about it that would reassure the soul. It was a journey into a strange, ethereal world, full of fog. Faces appear to his eyes from it, their features unclear. Whenever he tries to shine a glimmer of light on them, they flee, swallowed by darkness. His ears sometimes hear something like a murmur from it, and as soon as he strains his ears to distinguish their locations, they flee, retreating in silence and confusion. That magical period, with all its pleasure and pain, is lost, even those who lived through its strange era. They have drawn a curtain over it “Densely silenced and ignoring a wisdom that is not hidden, it disappeared without a reliable historian to tell of its wonders. How did it happen?! When did it happen? How did people realize that this mind had become something other than reason? And that its owner had become an abnormal individual who must be isolated from people like a predatory animal.” Naguib Mahfouz says in one of his interviews that his greatest pleasure was those hours when he would sit on the corner of a working-class neighborhood. And that is truly what the reader feels when he continues reading Naguib Mahfouz through his short story collection “Whispers of Madness.” That writer was not merely a transmitter of those images that animated the scenes of his narratives; rather, he was skilled in his depiction of the human soul with the various characters that filled his stories. He was so honest that the reader, having peeled away from his place, and the writer, transported to his world filled with those tales that, with their analyses and digressions, represent a part of reality, indeed the whole of reality.