At the center of Mahfouz's "Miramar" is the peasant girl Zohra, who flees to Alexandria in order to escape the traditionalist mores of her family. She finds employment as a servant at a pension, where five boarders have recently rented apartments, and "it is precisely her determination to emancipate herself, that the men about her admire...or resent," John Fowles writes in an introduction to the novel. "She stands for Egypt itself."

The story of the pension--and the killing that propels its plot--is told from four perspectives, each one revealing not only more about the incident but also details about the political ties and the backgrounds of the inhabitants of the Pension Miramar. At the opening of the novel, Mariana, the landlady and a widow twice over, lets a room to Amir, a retired journalist and lifelong bachelor, "driven into cold and meaningless neutrality" because of party differences by the likes of the "Muslim Brethren, whom I did not like [and] the Communists, whom I did not understand." One by one, the other four lodgers, as well as Zohra, present themselves, until the pension is full and the stage is set.

For Zohra, the Miramar becomes a safe house and a trap. Her family members attempt to flush her out of the building, but Mariana and the lodgers protect her from their rash, desperate attempts. But among her protectors she also becomes a source of jealousy. The two older residents regard the young woman as they would the past--what was or what might have been: youth, beauty, lost opportunities. The three younger men see her as representing the future: liberation, openness, confidence.

They all--old and young--vie for Zohra's attentions, and one of them dies, leaving everyone a suspect. "Everyone fought with him," Amir says of the victim. Indeed, like the various factions of Egypt, they all fought with each other, making and breaking alliances according to their shifting internecine struggles--both cultural and political. While the novel is a concise page-turner and a masterful character study, the whodunit aspect is not even the point; instead, "Miramar" is a window looking back on the post-Revolution Egyptian psyche and the disillusionment of its partisan elements.

At the center of Mahfouz's "Miramar" is the peasant girl Zohra, who flees to Alexandria in order to escape the traditionalist mores of her family. She finds employment as a servant at a pension, where five boarders have recently rented apartments, and "it is precisely her determination to emancipate herself, that the men about her admire...or resent," John Fowles writes in an introduction to the novel. "She stands for Egypt itself."

The story of the pension--and the killing at the center of its plot--is told from four perspectives, each one revealing not only more about the incident but also details about the political ties and the backgrounds of the inhabitants of the Pension Miramar. At the opening of the novel, Mariana, the landlady and a widow twice over, lets a room to Amir, a retired journalist and lifelong bachelor, "driven into cold and meaningless neutrality" because of party differences by the likes of the "Muslim Brethren, whom I did not like [and] the Communists, whom I did not understand." One by one, the other four lodgers, as well as Zohra, present themselves, until the pension is full and the stage is set.

For Zohra, the Miramar becomes a safe house and a trap. Her family members attempt to flush her out of the building, but Mariana and the lodgers protect her from their rash, desperate attempts. But among her protectors she also becomes a source of jealousy. The two older residents regard the young woman as they would the past--what was or what might have been: youth, beauty, lost opportunities. The three younger men see her as representing the future: liberation, openness, confidence.

They all--old and young--vie for Zohra's attentions, and one of them dies, leaving everyone a suspect. "Everyone fought with him," Amir says of the victim. Indeed, like the various factions of Egypt, they all fought with each other, making and breaking alliances according to their shifting internecine struggles--both cultural and political. A concise page-turner and a masterful character study, the whodunit is not even the point; instead, "Miramar" is a window looking back on the post-Revolution Egyptian psyche and the disillusionment of its partisan elements.

I loved the book and its depiction of daily life in Egypt. you can almost feel wanting to visit cairo while reading it. I felt the same reading Arab Voices.