The fiction of Naguib Mahfouz is marked by a clear, harsh view of modern Egyptian life, and his characters are frequently unsympathetic. Adrift on the Nile, one of the brief novels Mahfouz wrote in the ’60s after completing his massive Cairo Trilogy, is an exception to the rule and a good introduction to his work. Translated from the Arabic by Frances Liardet, it was published by Anchor Books in 1994.

Though its theme is familiar — the absurdity and emptiness of life in Cairo, and the yearning for a serious existence — Adrift on the Nile is marked by an unaccustomed sympathy, even tenderness for the characters. Amid the current turmoil in Egypt it offers a glimpse of a more peaceful time.

The novel’s main setting is a houseboat on the Nile where Anis Zaki, a bored and aimless civil servant, spends his leisure time in a narcotic daze induced by smoking kif (a mixture of tobacco and marijuana) in his water pipe, or using it to brew “magic coffee.” An educated man with an extensive library on the boat, Anis dreams of ancient times and imagines a whale that lives in the Nile and swims to his boat to visit him.

In the evenings Anis serves as master of ceremonies, tending the water pipe for a group of male and female friends who gather to smoke, banter, and flirt with one another. They have families and jobs —  the group includes an actor, a lawyer, a translator, an art critic, and a writer of short stories — but their approach to life is essentially cynical and unserious. Though their gatherings are sometimes roiled by political disputes or romantic misunderstandings, the friends are not really challenged to examine their lives until a new character arrives: Samara Bahgat, an elegant woman journalist whom Ragab the actor sees as “an alarmingly serious person.”

Despite its brief length, Adrift on the Nile is unhurried and atmospheric. Little happens for most of the book, and the relationships among the characters are allowed to unfold gradually. Much of the story moves in and out of the dreamy, drug-blurred mind of Anis, slipping sometimes into a stream of consciousness, and the narrative shifts fluidly from the first to second to third persons. Mahfouz’s novels sometimes read like indictments of Egyptian society, but this one conveys the sense of what it is like for a essentially decent but troubled and drifting man to live in that society.

Ragab poured Samara a whiskey. Anis saw Sana snatching a furtive look at Samara from beneath her curls, and he smiled. As the coals glowed, he became merry. He offered the water pipe to Samara, but she declined, and all his encouragement was in vain. Everything was silent, save for the bubbling of the pipe. Then they were swept away on a stream of diverse remarks. American planes had made strikes on North Vietnam. Like the Cuban crisis, remember? And as for the rumors, there was no end to them. The world was teetering on the brink of an abyss. The price of meat, the problems of the government food cooperatives — and what about the workers and the peasants? And corruption, and hard currency, and socialism, and the way the streets were jammed with private cars? And Anis said to himself: All these things lie in the bowl of the pipe, to go up in smoke, like the vegetable dish, mulukhiya, which Amm Abduh cooked for lunch that day. Like our old motto, “If I were not, I would wish to be.” And when a light like the light of  these embers blazes in the heavens, the astronomer says that a star has exploded, and in turn the planets around it, and everything has been blown to dust. And one day the dust fell onto the surface of the earth and life sprang from it …