IDRIS, Yusuf.

£15,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Excerpt from an unpublished manuscript draft of the short story "Madame Vienna" / "Vienna 60". Three previously unrecorded manuscripts in the hand of the great Egyptian author Yusuf Idris, comprising excerpts from a short story and two newspaper articles; no comparable autograph material has been traced on the market. The paper matches that of a recently rediscovered manuscript of his play al-Farafir (1964).The literary excerpt derives from an apparently unrecorded draft of the story first published as "Madame Vienna" (1959) and later retitled "Vienna 60" (1980). Exploring the intersection of Orientalism and desire, the narrative follows Darsh, an Egyptian clerk in Cairo, during a night with an Austrian woman in Vienna. The present section recounts their encounter in her apartment and differs from the published text in tone and detail, preserving deleted sentences and paragraphs - including her reflections on her "Oriental" lover - and softer later substitutions, such as "he took off his clothes" becoming "he took off his jacket". Idris marked the text as Section 4 with separate pagination before renumbering it within a complete manuscript, an instructive witness to his compositional method.The remaining manuscripts are drafts of two unpublished newspaper articles. One, likely written around the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, satirizes the Egyptian media's obsessive refrain - "Israel in the morning, Israel in the afternoon... Israel Israel Israel" - and calls for a week's moratorium

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