Tawfik Al-Hakim’s classic novel gets 85th-anniversary English-language edition 

DUBAI: London-based publisher Saqi Books is marking the 85th anniversary of the release of the seminal Egyptian writer Tawfik Al-Hakim’s satirical classic “Diary of a Country Prosecutor” with a special English-language paperback edition on July 11. 

“Both a comedy of errors and a trenchant social satire, this classic by one of the Arab world’s leading dramatists has lost none of its bite,” the publisher states in its press release.  

As the title suggests, it is the fictional journal of a public prosecutor stationed somewhere in rural Egypt. Laced with the kind of dark humor that arises from only the most horrific circumstances, the book “takes aim at a self-interested ruling class and the hapless public servants at their disposal,” the release continues.  

In his foreword, the late novelist P.H. Newby writes: “Al-Hakim’s comedy is blacker than anything Gogol or Dickens wrote because life for the Egyptian peasantry was blacker than for the nineteenth-century Russian serf or English pauper,” adding that Al-Hakim’s “bitter humor” focused on “a social reality that he plainly regarded as shocking and, since he saw no immediate way of improving it, dispiriting.” 

Al-Hakim is widely regarded as one of the greats of Arabic literature and drama, on a par with his great friend and peer, Naguib Mahfouz. (When Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, he insisted that Al-Hakim would have won it, had he still been alive.) 

Saqi’s editorial director Elizabeth Biggs tells Arab News: “There is a beautiful photograph of Al-Hakim and Mahfouz that was taken in a café sometime in 1982, when both men are old and iconic. Mahfouz is in his dark glasses and a sharp coat; Al-Hakim is gesticulating animatedly in a spotless beige flat cap. They are both smiling, sharing some joke. It’s obvious from this photograph that these two know some wisdom and kindness about the human condition the rest of us are still trying to find.”  

She describes Al-Hakim and Mahfouz as “the real pioneers of the novel in Arabic,” saying: “They built on one another’s legacies and inspired subsequent generations of writers around the world. Their skills in turning universal human foibles into timeless classics are unmatched, except by one another. ‘Diary of a Country Prosecutor’ is full of such vignettes, starring people who ‘mean well,’ but lack the requisite knowledge or skills to execute their ambitions, attempting to wrangle order out of confusion.  

“It’s hard to unwind from this small but rich tapestry of a novel one thread when it is composed of so many vivid ones: social, political, local, national and international commentaries. Al-Hakim frequently chose to focus the lens of his writing on the farmers of the Delta and the ‘force within them they’re not conscious of.’ Like another of Al-Hakim’s novels, ‘Return of the Spirit,’ it’s a kind of apprenticeship novel,” she continues. “We are all works in progress who must take to the stage when we’re only really ready for the dress rehearsal while, on the other side of the room, Mahfouz and Al-Hakim are sipping coffee, making notes, smiling kindly and encouraging us to keep on going.”