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A la deriva en el Nilo
«El narguile prosiguió su ronda melodiosa e incandescente. Un halo de mosquitos giraba alrededor de la lámpara de neón. Fuera del balcón, la oscuridad se había instalado y en el Nilo solo aparecían formas geométricas regulares e irregulares reflejadas por las farolas de la calle en la otra orilla y las ventanas iluminadas de las casas flotantes.»
A la deriva en el Nilo, inédita en español hasta ahora, fue publicada por primera vez en al año 1.966, y en ella el premio nobel Naguib Mahfuz escenifica el desarraigo de la cosmopolita clase media egipcia. Anís Zaki, su protagonista, es un funcionario hastiado que cada noche acoge en una casa flotante en el Nilo a un grupo variopinto de amigos cínicos y desencantados para compartir una pipa de agua llena de kif.
Se trata de una novela de tintes oníricos y nostálgicos que podría definirse como un pequeño y elegante drama existencial. La casa flotante representa una isla permisiva, una huida de la vida real, en la que Anís marca el paso de una noche a otra, cuando él y sus amigos de treinta y tantos se reúnen para mantener conversaciones interminables y sin rumbo sobre la sociedad egipcia, la política y la religión que hoy resultan sorprendentemente actuales.
A la deriva en el Nilo, inédita en español hasta ahora, fue publicada por primera vez en al año 1.966, y en ella el premio nobel Naguib Mahfuz escenifica el desarraigo de la cosmopolita clase media egipcia. Anís Zaki, su protagonista, es un funcionario hastiado que cada noche acoge en una casa flotante en el Nilo a un grupo variopinto de amigos cínicos y desencantados para compartir una pipa de agua llena de kif.
Se trata de una novela de tintes oníricos y nostálgicos que podría definirse como un pequeño y elegante drama existencial. La casa flotante representa una isla permisiva, una huida de la vida real, en la que Anís marca el paso de una noche a otra, cuando él y sus amigos de treinta y tantos se reúnen para mantener conversaciones interminables y sin rumbo sobre la sociedad egipcia, la política y la religión que hoy resultan sorprendentemente actuales.
176 pages, Paperback
Published September 24, 2025
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About the author
Naguib Mahfuz
35 books6 followersSpanish spelling
For author's profile, see Naguib Mahfouz (as spelled in English)
For author's profile, see Naguib Mahfouz (as spelled in English)
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 10, 2025
Adrift on the Nile is a brief, disturbing novel about a group of educated Cairenes who retreat to a houseboat on the Nile each night to smoke kif, talk, and slowly abandon any sense of responsibility, until a fatal accident exposes how far they have drifted from moral reality. It is a compact work that fuses social satire, existential reflection, and political allegory, and it occupies a crucial transitional place in Mahfouz’s career between large-scale realism and more modernist, symbolic fiction.
The Story
Anis Zaki, a minor bureaucrat, spends his days in dull government work and his nights on a friend’s houseboat, where a shifting circle of journalists, artists, and professionals gather to smoke, drink, and argue about art, politics, and meaning. Their routine is jolted when a serious, idealistic young woman, Samara, enters the group and questions their escapism, exposing the emptiness behind their intellectual posturing and hedonism.
As the nights blur together and the kif deepens their detachment, the group grows more careless, more cynical, and more insulated from the realities of the city beyond the riverbank. This detachment culminates in a nighttime car outing during which they run over a pedestrian and flee, a hit-and-run that lays bare their moral collapse and leaves Anis in a haze of guilt, uncertainty, and near-madness.
Strengths and weaknesses
The novel is powerful in its tight focus: the restricted setting, recurring cast, and compressed timeline create a claustrophobic pressure that makes the final catastrophe feel both shocking and inevitable. Critics praise its blend of black comedy and seriousness, the sharpness of its dialogue, and the way it turns a single moral crisis into a portrait of a whole generation’s complicity and drift.
At the same time, many readers find the characters more like symbols than fully rounded people, with each member of the group representing a social or intellectual type rather than undergoing deep development. The ending, which refuses a neat resolution, strikes some as abrupt or emotionally distant, reinforcing the book’s intellectual impact at the expense of a more cathartic or empathetic conclusion.
Mahfouz’s style here is spare, dialog-driven, and almost theatrical: much of the novel unfolds as conversations on the boat, giving it the feel of a chamber play set against the shifting backdrop of the Nile at night. The prose (in translation) avoids ornament, instead using repetition—of gatherings, questions, and jokes—to convey the numbing cycle of the group’s escapism and the slow erosion of moral clarity.
The tone balances irony and melancholy: the group’s clever talk, satire, and occasional humor float over an undercurrent of dread, as if everyone senses that their drift cannot go on indefinitely without disaster. This mixture of light surface and dark subtext connects the novel to existential and dystopian traditions as much as to straightforward social realism.
Within Mahfouz’s body of work, Adrift on the Nile comes after the grand canvases of The Cairo Trilogy and before the more experimental, fragmentary novels of his later years, marking a shift toward allegory and concentrated settings. Scholars often see it as a bridge text that compresses his long-standing themes—social change, moral responsibility, and the role of the intelligentsia—into a single, emblematic situation on the houseboat.
It is also closely tied to its historical moment in 1960s Egypt, capturing the disillusionment and evasion of a middle class living under Nasser’s authoritarianism and on the edge of the 1967 defeat. The widely seen 1971 film adaptation helped cement the book’s status in Egypt as a key cultural work about political malaise and the failures of the intellectual elite.
The Story
Anis Zaki, a minor bureaucrat, spends his days in dull government work and his nights on a friend’s houseboat, where a shifting circle of journalists, artists, and professionals gather to smoke, drink, and argue about art, politics, and meaning. Their routine is jolted when a serious, idealistic young woman, Samara, enters the group and questions their escapism, exposing the emptiness behind their intellectual posturing and hedonism.
As the nights blur together and the kif deepens their detachment, the group grows more careless, more cynical, and more insulated from the realities of the city beyond the riverbank. This detachment culminates in a nighttime car outing during which they run over a pedestrian and flee, a hit-and-run that lays bare their moral collapse and leaves Anis in a haze of guilt, uncertainty, and near-madness.
Strengths and weaknesses
The novel is powerful in its tight focus: the restricted setting, recurring cast, and compressed timeline create a claustrophobic pressure that makes the final catastrophe feel both shocking and inevitable. Critics praise its blend of black comedy and seriousness, the sharpness of its dialogue, and the way it turns a single moral crisis into a portrait of a whole generation’s complicity and drift.
At the same time, many readers find the characters more like symbols than fully rounded people, with each member of the group representing a social or intellectual type rather than undergoing deep development. The ending, which refuses a neat resolution, strikes some as abrupt or emotionally distant, reinforcing the book’s intellectual impact at the expense of a more cathartic or empathetic conclusion.
Mahfouz’s style here is spare, dialog-driven, and almost theatrical: much of the novel unfolds as conversations on the boat, giving it the feel of a chamber play set against the shifting backdrop of the Nile at night. The prose (in translation) avoids ornament, instead using repetition—of gatherings, questions, and jokes—to convey the numbing cycle of the group’s escapism and the slow erosion of moral clarity.
The tone balances irony and melancholy: the group’s clever talk, satire, and occasional humor float over an undercurrent of dread, as if everyone senses that their drift cannot go on indefinitely without disaster. This mixture of light surface and dark subtext connects the novel to existential and dystopian traditions as much as to straightforward social realism.
Within Mahfouz’s body of work, Adrift on the Nile comes after the grand canvases of The Cairo Trilogy and before the more experimental, fragmentary novels of his later years, marking a shift toward allegory and concentrated settings. Scholars often see it as a bridge text that compresses his long-standing themes—social change, moral responsibility, and the role of the intelligentsia—into a single, emblematic situation on the houseboat.
It is also closely tied to its historical moment in 1960s Egypt, capturing the disillusionment and evasion of a middle class living under Nasser’s authoritarianism and on the edge of the 1967 defeat. The widely seen 1971 film adaptation helped cement the book’s status in Egypt as a key cultural work about political malaise and the failures of the intellectual elite.
January 6, 2026
Uno de mis escritores favoritos. En una barcaza del Nilo, un grupo de gente usa la droga para escapar de un mundo que no entienden. Buscan sobrevivir a un mundo sinsentido en esta casa flotante. Existencialismo, nihilismo…un libro precioso.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews