الشحاذ

Omar al-Hamzawi is a successful Cairo lawyer with a loving family and every material comfort, and yet he is gripped by a paralyzing spiritual malaise — a conviction that his life has become meaningless and that the idealism of his youth has curdled into empty routine.

Desperate to feel alive again, he abandons his work and family and plunges into a restless pursuit of sensual pleasure and, ultimately, mystical transcendence, drifting further and further from the world of ordinary responsibility.

Set in the disillusioned Egypt of the mid-1960s, Naguib Mahfouz's The Beggar is a spare, introspective novel about ennui, the search for meaning, and the wreckage left behind when a man decides that nothing matters.