The forest and the cage

There is no escape from prison except to it; from the prison of poverty to the prison of employment, from the prison of loneliness to the prison of marriage, from the chaos prison to the prison of the dictator, from the prison of obeying parents to the prison of feeling the wolf alive against them. The poet once complained: I see myself in three of my prisons, three? They are a paradise if their prisons were limited to three! Add to the list the prison of the genome, the prison of fate and destiny, the prison of belonging to the believers, and the prison of alienation if you rebel against it, and above all and after everything: the prison of boredom. The hero of "The Jungle and the Cage" is a doctor and psychotherapist, his life between Egypt and Europe. As for his patients, their stories are strange and bizarre: a lost child from his home, an elderly man who has always ignited the feelings of Egyptians with his eloquence, a literary critic seeking the truth, and a young man obsessed with the truth of the famous writer Khairy Shalaby’s talent, and a depressed monkey confused between the jungle and the cage, among others. The novel is the doctor’s journey with each of them, and finally with himself, who turns out to also need treatment.