The Thief and the Dogs
SynopsisPlot
After four years in prison, the skilled young thief Said Mahran emerges bent on revenge. He finds a world that has changed in more ways than one. Egypt has undergone a revolution and, on a more personal level, his beloved wife and his trusted henchman, who conspired to betray him to the police, are now married to each other and are keeping his six-year-old daughter from him. But in the most bitter betrayal, his mentor, Rauf Ilwan, once a firebrand revolutionary who convinced Said that stealing from the rich in a unjust society is an act of justice, is now himself a rich man, a respected newspaper editor who wants nothing to do with the disgraced Said. As Said's wild attempts to achieve his idea of justice badly misfire, he becomes a hunted man so driven by hatred that he can only recognize too late his last chance at redemption.
Story
About this book
Said Mahran, a young thief, walks out of prison after four years to find that both his country and his personal life have shifted beneath him. Egypt has passed through a revolution, and his wife has married the very man who helped send Said to jail. Together they are raising his six-year-old daughter, and Said is shut out. The premise sets a tight, fast-moving story in which personal grievance and political change press against each other from the first pages.
Equally painful for Said is the transformation of Rauf Ilwan, the radical thinker who once taught him that robbing the wealthy was a form of social justice. Ilwan is now a prosperous newspaper editor with no interest in his former protégé. Said's attempts to settle accounts go badly wrong, turning him from pursuer into fugitive. Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, uses the structure of a chase story to examine betrayal, class resentment, and the distance between revolutionary ideals and what people do once they hold power. The novella is set in Cairo and draws much of its tension from the city's crowded streets and shifting loyalties.
