Paging All Bookworms! discussion
PAGE COUNT TRACKING - 2021
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JamesFoster 2021 Page count
Jan 1155. Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist [2012, tr. 2017] 129 pages
Antoon's third novel, The Baghdad Eucharist tells the story of a Christian family caught up in the sectarian violence in Iraq under the American occupation. The original Arabic title was Ta Maryam -- Hail Mary. A very powerful short novel about the hatred that religious differences cause when secularism is abandoned.
Jun 1256. Critical Articles on The Comedy of Errors 125 pages
Seven articles on The Comedy of Errors downloaded from Academic Search Premier.
Kinney, Arthur F., "Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds" (Studies in Philology 85, 1, Winter 1988) 24 pages -- Argues that The Comedy of Errors is not simply a farce but a religious comedy about the reconciliation of humanity through the Nativity. Seems to have been very influential on later critics.
Dutton, Richard, "The Comedy of Errors and The Calumny of Apelles: An Exercise in Source Study" (Religion and the Arts 7, 1/2, March 2003) 20 pages -- Identifies Lucian's The Calumny of Apelles as a source of The Comedy of Errors; sees slander as a major theme of the play.
Franco, George Fredric, "Epidamnus, Thucydides and The Comedy of Errors" (International Journal of the Classical Tradition 16, 2, Jun 2009) 7 pages -- Discusses the references to Epidamnus in The Comedy of Errors and argues that they are based on Thucydides' History of the Pelopponesian War.
Dodson-Robinson, Eric, ""A Thousand Marks": Language and Comic Violence in The Comedy of Errors and Shakespeare's Plautus" (Journal of the Wooden O 9, 2009) 10 pages -- Contrasts the use of violence in Plautus and in The Comedy of Errors and how Shakespeare has accommodated Roman culture to Elizabethan expectations.
Traill, Ariana, "Casina and The Comedy of Errors" (International Journal of the Classical Tradition 18, 4, Dec 2011) 26 pages -- Argues that Plautus' Casina was a source of The Comedy of Errors, especially with reference to the wife and sister of Antipholus of Ephesus; discusses the differences between Casina and other plays of Plautus.
Huhn, Jessica, "Marriage, Credit-Worthiness, and the Woman Chained in The Comedy of Errors (Journal of the Wooden O 16/17, 2018) 31 pages -- a feminist analysis of the play.
Edwards, Jennifer, ""Mark how he trembles in his ecstacy": Space, Place and Self in The Comedy of Errors" (Shakespeare Studies 48, 2020) 7 pages -- Discusses the role of ecstacy in the madness of Antipholus.
Jun 1357. William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, Pericles, Prince of Tyre [1608 or 1609] 110 pages [Kindle]
As always this time of year, I am rereading the plays which I will see in a month at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Although not included in the First Folio, perhaps because Shakespeare was not considered the primary author, this was added in the Third Folio (along with seven plays now considered "apocryphal"), and has since been considered part of the "canon", unlike The Two Noble Kinsmen, his collaboration with John Fletcher, which has only recently been promoted to that status, and Edward III on which the jury is still out. I would have to agree with most critics from Ben Jonson through the last century that it is one of his least well-written plays, although it has always been one of his most popular -- without the subtlety and ambiguity of his best plays, and with a happy ending, it fits with what makes a popular "best-seller".
The first of the so-called "Romances", this is a late work, but one which has many similarities to what is possibly his first play, The Comedy of Errors (also being performed at USF this summer.) Both plays are about a father who loses his wife and child, and is reunited with them at the end; in both plays, the wife has become a priestess/abbess at the temple/church of Ephesus. Both works are based fairly closely on classical sources, The Comedy of Errors on Plautus' Menaechmi and Pericles on the story of Apollonius of Tyre (probably originally a Greek "novel" of the second century, although only extant in Latin from about the fifth century), as translated into English poetry ca. 1400 in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and rendered into prose in 1572 in Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures.
Wilkins and Shakespeare have deliberately given the play a somewhat "archaic" treatment, with John Gower appearing as a "chorus" to explain the action in rhymed verse. With a story starting with incest, having two tournaments, two shipwrecks, pirates, foiled murders, and so forth, it is an adventure story more about plot than character, although modern critics manage to find profound and religious meanings in it all.
Jun 1558. Critical Articles on Pericles Prince of Tyre 238 pages
Seven articles on Pericles downloaded from Academic Search Premier.
Kiefer, Frederick, "Art, Nature and the Written Word in Pericles" (University of Toronto Quarterly, 61, 2, Winter 1991) -- Discusses the nature and art metaphors in the play.
Williams, Deanne, "Papa Don't Preach: The Power of Prolixity in Pericles" (University of Toronto Quarterly, 71, 2, Spring 2002) -- Discusses the role of incest and interprets the play as about silence and speech.
Horwitz, Greg Andrew, "A Tempest, A Birth, and Death: Freud, Jung, and Shakespeare's Pericles" (Sexuality and Culture, 6, 3, Summer 2002) -- Interprets the play as about Pericles' development in terms of Freudian and Jungian theories.
Tartamella, Suzanne, "Shakespeare the Escape Artist: Sourcing the East in Pericles, Prince of Tyre" (Studies in Philology, 115, 3, Summer 2018) -- Discusses the possibility of references to Orthodox religion in the play. Has much good background.
Homem, Rui Carvalho, "Offshore Desires: Mobility, Liquidity and History in Shaakespeare's Mediterranean" (Critical Survey, 3,3, Autumn 2018) -- Discusses references to commerce in Pericles and The Comedy of Errors
Knapper, David, "Thunderings, Not Words: Aspectcs of Pauline Style in Pericles and The Winter's Tale" (Shakespeare Studies, 47, 2019) -- Shows that Shakespeare uses figures that are used in Paul's letters in both plays.
Jun 1559. Naguib Mahfouz, Love in the Rain [1973, tr. 2011] 132 pages
This short novel interweaves the stories of three pairs of lovers and others connected with them; all the stories contain some tragedy, although some have somewhat happy endings. The novel takes place against the background of the defeat of June 1967.
Jun 1860. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Richard the Third [1592 or 1593; Mark Eccles, ed., Signet Classic ed., 1964] 256 pages
61. Taylor Littleton and Robert R. Rea, edd., To Prove a Villain: The Case of King Richard III [1964] 206 pages
Both of these books contain the text of Shakespeare's play, which I will be seeing performed next month in Cedar City. It was Shakespeare's first real popular success, and a sort of sequel to his trilogy of plays about Henry VI.
The Signet edition has a short excerpt from Thomas More's The History of King Richard III and a longer series of excerpts from Holinshed's Chronicles; the Littleton-Rea book has a long excerpt from More and a shorter one from Holinshed. More and Holinshed, Shakespeare's sources, are about the same since the latter is virtually a reprint of the former for the period in question.
The Signet edition also has some short excerpts from Charles Lamb, as well as a chapter from Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's "Histories": Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy and A.P. Rossiter's article "Angel with Horns: The Unity of Richard III", both from 1947.
The Littleton-Rea book is more concerned with the historical Richard III and contains excerpts from an anonymous "Praise of King Richard III", Polydore Vergil's English History, The Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, A Mirror for Magistrates, and Sir Francis Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII; and from the two "rehabilitations" of Richard, Horace Walpole's "Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third" and Clements R. Markham's "Richard III, A Doubtful Verdict Reviewed" as well as a middle-of-the-road article, A.R. Meyers' "The Character of Richard III". Somewhat bizarrely, it also reprints an entire novel, Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, which simply repeats Markham's arguments verbatim although written fifty years later, with no mention of any of the refutations of that book or any later evidence.
Jun 2062. Naguib Mahfouz, Karnak Café [1974, tr. 2007] 101 pages
Set immediately before and after the June 1967 defeat, this is one of Mahfouz' most directly political novels. Three of the regular customers at the Karnak Cafè. two young men and a young woman, are arrested by the regime on vague political charges. The book is an indictment of the repressive policies followed as the 1952 Revolution degenerated.
Jun 263. Critical Articles on Richard III 14 articles, 313 pages
Neill, Michael, "Shakespeare's Halle of Mirrors: Play, Politics, and Psychology in Richard III (Shakespeare Studies 8, 1975) 31 pages -- Discusses Richard III as an actor/playwright staging his own history in the play.
Brooks, Harold F., "'Richard III', Unhistorical Amplifications: The Women's Scenes and Seneca" (Modern Language Review, 75, 4, Oct 1980) 17 pages -- Discusses the relation of Seneca, especially Troades, to the scenes of the four women in the play.
Burton, Dolores M., "Discourse and Decorum in the First Act of Richard III" (Shakespeare Studies 14, 1981) 30 pages -- Discusses the speeches in the first act in terms of Elizabethan rhetorical theory.
Hassel, R. Chris, Jr., "Last Words and Last things: St. John, Apocalypse, and Eschatology in Richard III" (Shakespeare Studies, 18, 1986) 16 pages -- Discusses the biblical book of Revelation as a source of imagery in the play.
Rackin, Phyllis, "Engendering the Tragic Audience: The Case of Richard III (Studies in the Literary Imagination, 26, 1, Spr 1993) 19 pages -- A feminist analysis of the play; somewhat disappointing after reading Rackin's book.
Hunt, Maurice, "Shakespeare's King Richard III and the Problematics of Tudor Bastardy" (Papers in Language and Literature, 1997) 27 pages -- Discusses the question of illegitimacy in the Tudor line and how it relates to Shakespeare's use of the theme in the play.
Goodland, Katharine, ""Obsequious Laments": Mourning and Communal Memory in Shakespeare's Richard III" (Religion & the Arts 7, 1/2, Mar 2003) 34 pages -- Discusses funeral customs in the play and in Shakespeare's time.
Gürle, F. Meltem, "Reasoning with the Murderer: the Killing of Clarence in Richard III (Journal of the Wooden O, 11, 2011) 16 pages -- An analysis of the murder scene in the Tower.
Machlis Meyer, Allison, "Richard III's Forelives: Rewriting Elizabeth(s) in Tudor Historiography" (Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 26, 2013) 28 pages -- Discusses Elizabeth of York as a forerunner of Elizabeth I, and discusses the characters of Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth of York in More, Vergil, Hall and Shakespeare.
Hebert, L. Joseph, "The Reward of a King: Machiavelli, Aquinas, and Shakespeare's Richard III" (Perspectives on Political Science, 44, 4, Oct-Dec 2015) 9 pages -- Discusses the play as a criticism of Machiavelli.
Miller, Gemma, ""Many a time and oft had I broken my Neck for their amusement": The Corpse, the Child, and the Aestheticization of Death in Shakespeare's Richard III and King John" (Comparative Drama, 50, 2/3, Summer/Fall 2016) 24 pages -- Discusses the deaths of the two princes in Richard III and Arthur in King John. Argues that Shakespeare tries to undercut the sentimentalizing of the children by showing them as real characters rather than idealized symbols of innocence. Discusses various modern performances of the play from that perspective.
Sheen, Erica, "Missing a Horse: Richard and White Surrey" (Comparative Drama, 50, 2/3, Summer/Fall 2016) 18 pages -- Discusses the role of offstage horses in the first tetralogy. More about Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty than about the play.
Bischoff, Sarah, "Richard's Body Politic: Disability and Ability in Shakespeare's Histories" (Journal of the Wooden O, 18, 2018) 17 pages -- Discusses Richard's deformity as it does or doesn't relate to "disability theory".
Kim, Jaecheol, "The North in Shakespeare's Richard III" (Studies in Philology, 116, 3, Summer 2019) 27 pages -- One of the more interesting articles, considers the play as about the conflicts between the North and South of England. Interesting if not always consistent, but whatever may be the case for the actual history I don't think that it is what one would get from the play itself.
Jun 2464. William Shakespeare, Cymbeline [about 1609-1610?] 150 pages
The last of the four Shakespeare plays I will be seeing in about three weeks at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. The other three are The Comedy of Errors, Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Tragedy of King Richard III. Since Pericles is essentially a retelling of the same plot as Comedy of Errors (father reunited with his lost wife and child in Ephesus), it occurred to me that there was possibly a similar relationship between the two Milford Haven plays, and that Cymbeline is essentially a "happier" retelling of Richard III: the two princes come back from apparent death in the Tower/cave, kill Richard III/Clothen, and together with their sister Elizabeth/Imogen join the army of Henry VII/Posthumus at Milford Haven. Posthumus even has a dream before the battle where he is blessed by family members killed by the Romans. The play also seems to reverse Shakespeare's other tragedies: Othello/Posthumus doesn't succeed in killing Desdemona/Imogen, Juliette/Imogen awakens from her fake death to find the corpse of Romeo/Posthumus (she thinks) but doesn't commit suicide, King Lear/Cymbeline is reunited with his estranged daughter. . .
Which is not to say it isn't also about James I and all the other things that the critics see in it.
65. Critical articles on Cymbeline 9 articles, 180 pagesLeggat, Alexander, "The Island of Miracles: An Approach to Cymbeline" (Shakespeare Studies, 10, 1977) 19 pages -- Contrasts Britain as land of imagination and Italy as land of cynical reality.
Lawry, J.S., "'Perishing Root and Increasing Vine' in Cymbeline" (Shakespeare Studies, 12, 1979) 15 pages -- Discusses the play as about identifying opposites, especially North and South (Britain and Italy.)
Parolin, Peter A., "Anachronistic Italy: Cultural Alliances and National Identity in Cymbeline" (Shakespeare Studies, 30, 2002) 28 pages -- Notes the anachronism of having both ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy in the same play. Claims that the play critiques the Stuart project of reclaiming England as the heir to Roman culture by showing the possibility of becoming like Italy.
Hunt, Maurice, "Dismemberment, Corporal Reconstitution, and the Body Politic in Cymbeline" (Studies in Philology, 99, 4, Fall 2002) 28 pages Discusses allusions in the play to body parts in connection with the idea of the body politic in Elizabethan political theory.
Innes, Paul, "Cymbeline and Empire" (Critical Survey 99, 2, 2007) 18 pages -- Discusses the play in relation to James I's project of uniting England and Scotland.
Jackson, McDonald P., "A Lover's Complain, Cymbeline, and the Shakespeare Canon: Interpreting Shared Vocabulary" (Modern Language Review, 103, 3, July 2008) 18 pages -- Argues for the authenticity of A Lover's Complaint as Shakespeare's based on vocabulary, especially rare words in common with Cymbeline.
McCarthy, Penny, "Cymbeline: "The First Essay of a new Brytish Poet"?" (Critical Survey, 21, 2, 2009) 17 pages -- Argues that the "late" romances, and Cymbeline in particular, are actually very early works of Shakespeare. Makes some points against the traditional dating but quickly becomes fairly far-fetched in its claims about Shakespeare and the Dudleys. Not convincing.
Scala, Elizabeth, "Dressing Up as a Franklin's Housewife: Native Sources for Shakespeare's Cymbeline" (Texas Studies in Literature & Language, 59, 2, 2017) 25 pages -- Comparative study of Cymbeline and Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale", showing parallels and suggesting that it is a kind of source for the play, more for the situation than the plot itself. Very interesting.
Saidenberg, Madeleine, "Sense and Conscience: Cymbeline's Insensible Bodies on the Indoor Stage" (Journal of the Wooden O, 19, 2019) 12 pages Discusses the play as about the inner experience as a corrective to the errors of the senses, starting off from a discussion of the dead bodies on stage. Makes some good points about the play as a reworking/parody of his earlier work (which was the impression I had about the play reading it before reading any criticisms.)
June 2866. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.1 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] 668 pages
The classic Richard Burton translation of the Thousand and One Nights, based on the much longer Egyptian version (I've already read the shorter Syrian version which is equivalent to the first volume and a half of this), published in ten volumes plus six supplementary volumes. Since this is a Project Gutenberg e-book, there are no page numbers, but going by the print edition I have of the third and fourth volumes, the first two volumes average 668 pages each so I'm using that. I will wait until I finish the whole series (hopefully over the next three or four months) to write a real review.
June 3067. Hala Alyan, Salt Houses [2017] 314 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]
Salt Houses, Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan's first novel, is the story of four generations of a relatively well-to-do Palestinian family in the diaspora. The novel is told from the viewpoints of different family members. it begins in 1963 in Nablus, where the family settled after being driven out of Jaffa by the 1948 Israeli invasion of Palestine, with Salma, eventually the great-grandmother, preparing for the wedding of her youngest daughter Alia; other chapters are from the perspectives of Alia, her older sister and brother Mustafa, her husband, her three children and her three grandchildren. The family flees to Kuwait City after the 1967 war, when persecution of Palestinians increased, then flees again when Saddam invades Kuwait. The youngest daughter Su'ad is in the Boston at the time of the September 11 attack. Many of the family are in Beirut at the time of the Israeli attacks. In the end they are scattered between the United States and Ammanm which becomes the center, where Alia and her husband Atef end up. The novel is about the confusions of identity, the longings of each family member for the places where they grew up. The book is a very well-written first novel.
July 268. Naguib Mahfouz, Respected Sir [1975, tr 1986] 179 pages
This novel begins somewhat comically with the protagonist Othman in almost religious awe before the Director General as the representative of the State, his first day in the Civil Service. We learn that Othman is the orphan son of a poor cartman, who has managed by hard work to gain a certain education and become part of the government apparatus. The book follows his career as he rises through the various grades through his hard work and sacrifices, until at the end he realizes the price he has paid. A satire on the Egyptian government, but at the same time a very human tragedy.
July 369. Nawal El Sadaawi, Woman at Point Zero [1975, tr. 1983] 106 pages
Woman at Point Zero is undoubtedly El Sadaawi's best-known book. A strongly feminist novel, based on a true story, it is the final narration of a woman sentenced to death for murdering a man. The treatment of poor women in Egypt (and elsewhere) and the institutions of marriage and the family are subjected to a merciless critique. Of course, Firdaus' opinions are extreme, and don't entirely represent El Sadaawi's own views, but they are provocative.
70. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.2 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] 668 pagesSecond volume.
July 671. Naguib Mahfouz, Heart of the Night [1975, tr. 2011] 99 pages
A short novel that is basically a long discussion in a Cairo café. Jaafar al-Rawi is the impoverished grandson of a rich man who left his entire fortune as a waqf, a charitable endowment administered by a government department. He meets a government official to complain and they go out to the Café Wadud, where he spends the night telling his life story. A slight but interesting book.
July 7
72. The Works of Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan 320 pages
All fourteen of the comic operettas with words by Gilbert and music by Sullivan (although there is no music, just the lyrics, so I suppose it is really the works of Gilbert, which he wrote for his collaboration with Sullivan). There are also the short "Bab Ballads". The ancestors of the modern musical, these plays are somewhat silly, although there is a certain amount of good-natured satire, which may have been more daring at the time, especially of the House of Lords, then in the process of losing the last vestiges of actual governmental power. The book begins with the most popular works, The Mikado, HMS Pinafore, and The Pirates of Penzance (the last of which I will be seeing performed in a couple of weeks) and then has the others in no particular order that I could tell, either chronological or alphabetical. A fun read, although most of the impact is lost without the tunes, and while Gilbert was "liberal" for the period some of the social attitudes are very outmoded.
July 1373. Hala Alyan, The Arsonists' City [2021] 446 pages
The Arsonists' City is the second novel by the author of Salt Houses. Like the first novel, it is about a family originally from the Middle East (the father, Idris, a heart surgeon, is Lebanese, the mother, Mazna, is Syrian) which becomes dispersed because of the political and religious violence in the region. The book begins with a prologue about the murder of a young Palestinian man, Zakaria, living in the camps outside Beirut. It then opens in the present with three chapters, each from the perspective of one of the three children: Ava, married to a wealthy American named Nate whom she suspects of infidelity; the brother, Mimi (Marwan), who is a restaurant manager and leader of a mediocre rock band, and lives with a fairly well-off professional womaa named Harper; and Naj, who has returned to Beirut where she is part of a very succesful band and is a lesbian. These three chapters, grouped as Part One, were not all that interesting; they were focused on the lives and emotional problems of rich second-generation Americans, which I can't really relate to, although the third chapter in Beirut was a little better. They introduce the main plot of the novel: the grandfather has recently died in Beirut and the father wants to sell his house, while the mother, a rather unpleasant-seeming woman, has decided to oppose it, although she has always seemed to hate Beirut.
The novel then returns in Part Two to the mother's childhood in a poor family in Damascus (1965) and her aspirations to be an actress, her meetings with her future husband, Idris, and his best friend, Zakaria (1978); here we begin to understand the bitterness in her character and become more sympathetic to her. It becomes clear that she is the major character in the book.
In Part Three, the family gathers at the grandfather's house in Beirut, and many family secrets are gradually revealed to all the characters; this part also contains flashbacks to Idris and Mazna living in California when the children are growing up.
Despite a very slow start, the novel is interesting, although not as good as her first book. The style is the same, chapters from the perspectives of all the major characters, but it was overly long and could have used some tightening up, especially in the chapters set in the United States -- rich Americans just aren't that interesting, at least to me. The book has some interesting background about the political events in the Middle East -- the Palestinians, driven out of Palestine by the Zionist invasion, overwhelm Lebanon and cause a reaction which ends in religious and ethnic civil war; the Lebanese refugees from that war are looked down on in Syria, but eventually the Syrians in turn become refugees in Lebanon when the civil war begins against the Assad regime. Of course, those who are wealthy enough end up in the United States or Europe. Previous novels I have read this year covered the situations in Palestine and Syria so it was of some interest to read about events from the perspective of Lebanon. However, this was all background and the novel is actually much less political than Salt Houses.
July 1774. Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish [1977, tr. 1993] 406 pages
Naguib Mahfouz' The Harafish reminds me strongly of his earlier novel, translated as The Children of Gabelawi or The Children of the Alley. The earlier book was an allegory of religious history, with Adam, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and modern science replacing one another under the guise of rulers of an "alley" or neighborhood in Egypt. This novel does the same thing. It uses an alley in an unidentified place at an unidentified time and follows ten generations of a family in ten "tales". There is a mysterious but unattainable monastery which corresponds to the House of Gabelawi, an allegory of Heaven or God.
The first character is Ashur al-Nagi. He is warned by a vision to leave the alley, then later returns to take power and provide justice and dignity for the poor. ("Harafish" is the somewhat derogatory mediaeval Arabic term for the lower classes, in modern terms the proletariat and subproletariat.) He also dominates the other "alleys". At the end of the tale, he disappears, and it is rumored that he has become immortal. This seems to be an allegory for Mohammed, the Hegira and the founding of Islam. He is succeeded in power by his descendents (an allegory of the Caliphs?) who at first follow in his footsteps but later become seduced by wealth and end up as oppressors. The third character, who is still somewhat just to the poor and loyal to the memory of Ashur, but is the first to become extremely wealthy and and to effectively rule over all the surrounding alleys, is named Sulayman, i.e. Solomon, so there may also be a secondary allegory of Saul, David, Solomon and the succeeding Biblical kings of Judah.
The historical details, however, (and I'm not sure how closely he follows historical events) are less important than the pattern which repeats over and over: the well-intentioned characters who favor the poor gradually give themselves, their families and their "clan members", that is their military-administrative elite more and more privileges and come to identify less with the harafish than the "notables", marrying into the merchant class and leaving their lower class occupations and lifestyle behind. Although probably true of the kings and caliphs of the allegory, this pattern is also modern, and Mahfouz obviously has the Egyptian Revolution (and other modern revolutionary movements) in mind. While the ending is somewhat ambiguous, a solution is suggested.
The only problem with the novel is that the pattern is repeated with variants too many times, and it is difficult to remember the specific characteristics of the many family members and others from story to story. Nevertheless it is one of Mahfouz' best books and I would highly recommend it.
July 1875. Nawal el-Sadaawi, Two Women in One [1975, tr. 1985] 124 pages
This is a feminist psychological novel about a young woman who feels she is two people, one the obedient, well-behaved conventional medical student she appears, and the real her who rebels against the conformity of her life and expresses herself in works of art. A chance meeting at an exhibit of her paintings lets her true self emerge, but of course she is opposed by her family and society. The setting is Cairo, presumably about the time it was written, although there are no specific indications.
July 2276. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.3 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg]
Richard Burton's translation, the third volume of 10 (or 16 with the supplementary volumes), this volume contains some of the stories that were in the Galland translation and some animal fables from the Egyptian manuscripts. The actual book is worth reading, but the e-book versions, unusually for Project Gutenberg (unless they are changing for the worse) is very badly proofread, with typos (scanning errors) in almost every paragraph -- "shine" for "thine" every time it appears, and it's one of the most frequent words in the book, "c" for "e" or "o" very often, "m" for "in", "m," for "my", weird diacritics, etc. -- and the file description lists four proofreaders! Very difficult to read with this problem.
July 2377. Nawal el-Saadawi, The Circling Song [1973, tr. 1989] 88 pages
A children's game-song was the inspiration for this short, nightmarish surrealist novel, which is her most experimental. Hamida and Hamido are twins, although they seem sometimes to switch identities and genders, in a circle in which time and memory constantly change directions and life and death, childhood and age lose their meaning. There are allusions to genital mutilation, rape, honor killings, domestic slavery and military and police violence. The two siblings seem to exist at various times in history and in a way to represent all women and all men in Egypt. The writing is very powerful.
July 26. 78. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.4 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 300 pages
July 2779. Nawal el-Saadawi, She Has No Place in Paradise [tr. 1987] 177 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
A collection of eighteen short stories, mostly concerned with women or the relationships between men and women. Some are in a fairly realistic style, while others are in a more surrealist vein.
August 380. Saud Alsanousi, Mama Hissa's Mice [2015, tr. 2019] 377 pages [Kindle]
Mama Hissa's Mice is very different from Alsanousi's earlier novel The Bamboo Stalk which I read back in May of last year; while that was written in a traditional narrative style and set in a Kuwait that seemed more or less at peace, with the personal conflicts largely between wealth and poverty, this book is written in a more modernist style and focuses on the rise of sectarian hatred and violence, reminding me more of Khaled Khalifa's In Praise of Hatred. The book alternates between the events of one night of violence in the present and chapters of the protagonist Katkout's novel (which actually is not so much a novel as an autobiography and is divided into parts called "The First Mouse", "The Second Mouse" etc..) The present-day events are also told from the consciousness of Katkout and deal with the same characters as the "novel."
The first chapters of Katkout's novel have supposedly been removed by the publisher for fear of the censorship, which is odd since the remaining chapters are very political and those first chapters would presumably have been about his earliest childhood; what we are given begins with him starting middle school, in the early 1980's. The major characters are three families which are neighbors at the beginning in the Surra neighborhood: two older women friends, Mama Hissa and Bibi Zaynab (who is from Iraq originally, although the family pretends she is from Saudi Arabia), Mama Hissa's children Am Saleh and Fawzia, Bibi Zaynab's son Abbas, and Katkout's parents. Am Saleh's son Fahd, Abbas' son Sadiq, and Katkout are close friends, despite the dislike of their parents: Am Saleh is a bigoted Sunni and Abbas an equally bigoted Shi'ite. Katkout's parents are more secularized and simply identify as Moslem; he is never sure which sect he actually belongs to, so he often acts as a peacemaker and go-between. The two grandmothers are also peacemakers who oppose the hatred of their sons (although they are not perfect; they hate "Jews" whom they identify with the Israelis.) In the later chapters we are introduced to two other friends, Katkout's cousin Dhari and a young man named Ayub. Other characters are Am Saleh's wife Aisha and daughter Hawraa.
At the beginning, Kuwait, at most a minor player in Middle Eastern politics, is a relatively peaceful and neutral country with people from all countries in the region: Iraqis, Iranians, Palestinians and so forth. The hatreds are second-hand, imported from outside, beginning with the Iran-Iraq war. While it is obvious to outsiders that the war was largely economic and promoted by the Western powers, in the region it is taken for granted that it is a religious conflict between Sunni and Shi'a: Abbas's house has a portrait of Khomeini and Am-Saleh's a portrait of Saddam Hussein, and during the war Fahd and Sadiq are not allowed in each other's houses. Later, with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the portraits disappear and there is a brief period of patriotic unity, which disappears after the Americans force the Iraqis out. From there events lead to the present day which follows fairly closely on the last chapter of the "novel."
On the whole, the book is very pessimistic, but there are also elements of hope. Well worth reading.
August 4
81. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.5 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 300 pages
After the intensity of Mama Hissa's Mice, it was a relief to go back to this collection of mediaeval fantasy, where the dangers are from djinns and evil magicians, or occasionally robbers. This fifth volume is very uneven; it begins with one of the most interesting stories in the 1001 Nights, "The Ebony Horse" about a mechanical flying horse, but soon becomes a series of very short anecdotes, some moralizing, some comic, and some obviously just an excuse for the included verses, followed by a long tale which is essentially a Moslem catechism, before returning to the fantasies about djinns and so forth.
August 982. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology [1987] 498 pages
An anthology of about 300 poems (or excerpts from longer poems) by 93 different poets, from the end of the nineteenth century to shortly before it was published in 1987, in new English translations, Jayyusi's book gives a good overview of the poetry being written in the Arabic world. It begins with a 40 page introduction giving the history of modern Arabic poetry, which Jayyusi divides into four periods: the revival of poetry at the turn of the century (neo-classic poets such as Ahmad Shauqi, the earliest poet included); the Romantics, influenced by European Romanticism, beginning with the Arab (mainly Lebanese) expatriates in North America, most notably Kahlil Gibran; the Symbolists, also influenced by European models; and finally the free-verse movement and modernism. Unfortunately, the division of the book itself is less informative; it is divided simply into two parts, poets established before 1950 and poets who became active after 1950 -- the real dividing event is the Palestinian nakba of 1948 -- the arrangement within each section being alphabetical rather than chronological or stylistic.
A few of these poets I had already read quite a bit of (books by Nizar Qabbani, Adunis, Samih al-Qasim and of course Mahmoud Darwish) but there were no poems I recognized as having read; others I had heard of; but most were completely new to me. As with any wide-ranging anthology, the quality was somewhat uneven, but there was a lot of good poetry in this.
August 1083. Nawal El Saadawi, The Dramatic Literature of Nawal El Saadawi [Eng tr. 2009] 191 pages
In addition to novels, stories, and nonfiction, Nawal El Saadawi wrote seven plays, two of which are translated in this book. Isis (1987) uses the myth of the Egyptian goddess as an allegory for religious and political tyranny and the struggle against it; God Resigns at the Summit Meeting (1996) deals with the use of religion to oppress women and the poor. Both are very interesting.
August 1784. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature [1992] 754 pages
This anthology of Palestinian writings from both within Palestine and from the diaspora is divided equally between poetry and prose, mostly short stories with selections from two novels and excerpts from some memoirs. Although I recently read an anthology of Arabic poetry by the same editor, Salma Khadra Jayyusi, there were only eight poets in common between the two books and only three short poems were actually duplicates. This anthology had about 230 poems by over 60 authors; as with the other book the arrangement is alphabetic by name of the author, and despite some unevenness much of the poetry was quite good, although the themes were rather similar and I got a bit tired of all the birds, trees, seas, and suitcases.
The second half contained 25 short stories, all by different authors; as far as I could tell there were no stories duplicated in any of the four other anthologies of Arabic literature I have on my shelf waiting to be read (I'm hoping to finish my project in reading Arabic literature in the next month and a half.) There was less unevenness in the stories than in the poetry -- nearly all were good and although the same themes predominated the approaches were quite different. The book ended with thirteen excerpts from "Personal Accounts"; while most were about the disasters the Palestinians have suffered there were also some about the traditions of Palestine before 1948, the feasts and so forth, which were quite interesting to read.
August 1885. E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime [1975] 320 pages
I saw the movie adaptation of Ragtime shortly after it came out in 1981, and last month I saw a performance of the Terence McNally play based on the book, but I had never read the novel itself. It is a very powerful novel, not only about racism but also about class conflicts in the decade before World War I, with a chapter about the Lawrence textile workers' strike. While both the movie and play focus almost entirely on the main story of Coalhouse Walker, the Black man who resorts to violence after his car is vandalized by white firemen and the police and court system refuse to give him justice, there is much more in the novel.
The structure of the book reminded me of The Grapes of Wrath, with historical chapters interspersed with the chapters about the fictional or real but fictionalized characters (Emma Goldman is an important character, and there are many references to Houdini and to J.P. Morgan). The important fictional characters include a rich family in New Rochelle and a Jewish immigrant and his daughter.
One thing I found rather disconcerting was that the Coalhouse plot seems to take place over a few months, and at the end he asks about his son born at the beginning learning to walk and whether he has said any words yet, while the other simultaneous plots and the history chapters seem to occupy several years, from 1906 to at least the election of Wilson in 1912. Perhaps this explains why much of the other material is omitted in the movie and play.
August 2386. Denys Johnson-Davies, ed., The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction [2006] 486 pages
The first of four anthologies of Arabic fiction I am reading in August and September, this contains selections by 79 authors; 13 countries are represented, although Egypt predominates with about half the authors (39) being from that country. The selections are divided evenly between short stories and excerpts from novels; I don't really like that decision because novels aren't meant to be read in excerpts without context and because, since the excerpts are often the climax of the book, they are all spoilers if I ever were to read the actual books they are taken from (I skipped the selections from Mahfouz because the novels are on my list for next month.)
The selections were very diverse, both in content -- although there were many which dealt with political struggles and war, it was not as prominent as in the anthology of Palestinian writings I finished last week, and there were many that were love stories, coming-of-age stories, and other domestic sorts of stories -- and in style, with realist and romantic stories balanced by modernist and surreal stories. The selections were alphabetical by author rather than chronological or geographical; unlike the anthologies edited by Salma Jayyusi, there was no general introduction, although each author was prefaced by a one or two paragraph biography.
August 2387. Ronak Husni and Daniel L. Newman, edd., Modern Arabic Short Stories [2008] 296 pages
This bilingual reader contains twelve short stories by major Arabic writers, in Arabic with English translations. It is obviously designed for people learning Arabic, with language notes after each selection, and it is in order from least to most difficult in the original language. Of course I don't read Arabic, but the stories were all good in translation, including one I hadn't previously read by Naguib Mahfouz about a pair of Siamese twins.
August 2688. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.6 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 300 pages
The sixth volume contains four groups of stories, the Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, a second version of The City of Brass, The Seven Wazirs from the Book of al-Sindibad the Sage, and the long tale of Gharib and his Brother Ajib, which describes the conquest of the world by "Moslems" from before the time of Moses.
August 2689. Naguib Mahfouz, In the Time of Love [1980, tr. 2010] 122 pages
In the postmodern tradition, this seems like a simple story of a love triangle but it is a bit more.
Sept. 190. Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East [2006] 362 pages
This nonfiction book, the final reading in the Arabic literature project of the World Literature group on Goodreads, tells the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the meeting and eventual friendship of two families, the Khairis, especially Bashir, and the Eshkenazis, especially Dalia. At the beginning, the Palestinian family is living in the village of al-Ramla, and the Eshkenazis are living in Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian Jews are collected to be sent to Treblinka, but at the last minute through the intervention of "righteous Gentiles", particularly the Orthodox bishop, the deportations are postponed, and with the growing defeat of Germany are eventually abandoned. I had been unaware of this history and the fact that Bulgarian Jews, unlike Jews elsewhere in Eastern Europe, were not exterminated in the Holocaust, although the fascist government enforced anti-Jewish laws modeled after the German Nuremburg laws. After the war, Jewish emigration to Israel is permitted by the Stalinist regime with the approval of Stalin, and all but about 5000 Jews chose to leave. One thing I found very interesting is that in Bulgaria, perhaps unlike elsewhere, the Jews did not leave because of fear or trauma after the Holocaust but largely because as small shopkeepers they were unable to compete economically with the new state-run enterprises.
Meanwhile, in a more familiar story, the Khairis are driven out of their home by the Israeli terrorists during the 1948 Nakba and settle in Ramallah. The Eshkenazis arrive in Palestine and eventually move into the Khairis' house, which they believe was abandoned because the Arabs "ran away." The house has a lemon tree in the back yard, which becomes a symbol in the book. Dalia, a baby at the time of the emigration, grows up believing the official Israeli version of events and even serves in the Israeli army. After the June 1967 War, when Israel annexed the West Bank and ironically it became easier for Palestinians to travel into the Israeli-controlled territory, Bashir and two friends return for a visit to al-Ramla and he asks to look at the house. Dalia makes the decision to allow him in and they begin a thirty-five-year connection between the two families.
I was expecting that this would be a story about "typical" Jews and Palestinians, but while that may be true of Dalia, Bashir in fact became a leader of the Palestinian movement and close associate of Yasser Arafat, spending probably a quarter of his life in various Israeli prisons. The two families are essentially just a framework for a history of the conflict, which is fairly detailed; everything is documented in the source notes at the end. Tolan is committed to the view that personal friendships like this give a hope of reconciliation and peace, and Dalia shares this view, but Bashir and his family are more realistic and insist that no peace is possible without justice for the Palestinians. He insists on the return of the Palestinians and a single secular and democratic country in which all ethnic and religious groups would have equal rights, while Dalia insists that the Palestinians should sacrifice for a peace in which there would be two states, one exclusively Jewish on most of the land and one Palestinian on a small part of the land which was taken from them. She never leaves the position that any return of the Palestinians to their country would lead to the "destruction" of Israel as a Jewish state and thus is not to be considered. In the end, there is really no reconciliation or agreement, as there never will be without recognition of the right of the Palestinian exiles to return to their lands; but Dalia does recognize the injustices that the Israeli government was and still is committing and opposes the hatred. Tolan tries very hard to be "balanced" and give equal weight to both "perspectives", but in fact the book documents the many atrocities committed by the Israelis. It was a much better book than I had expected given the viewpoint.
Sept. 291. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Short Arabic Plays: An Anthology [2003] 466 pages
A collection of twenty short plays by sixteen authors, all but one translated from Arabic. Most are written in an experimental modernist or surrealist style; some deal allegorically with the question of Palestine, others are satires on bureaucracy or public apathy. Nearly all are in some way political, although a few are more existential. All were worth reading; I wonder if I will ever see any performed.
Sept. 592. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.7 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 350 pages
The seventh volume contains two good humorous "trickster" tales, the tale of Dalilah the Crafty and her daughter Zaynab the Coney-catcher, and its sequel, the tale of Mercury Ali of Cairo, and two supernatural romances, the tale of Julnar the Sea-Born and Her Son King Badr Basim of Persia which was also translated in the Galland version, and the tale of Prince Sayf Al-Muluk and the Princess Badi’a Al-Jamal which has several Sindbad-like episodes. The rest of the volume is fairly boring and some of the stories are essentially duplicates of earlier tales with different names.
Sept. 693. Nawal el-Saadawi, The Fall of the Imam [1987, tr. 1988] 208 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
Written after Nawal el-Saadawi's imprisonment under the Sadat regime, The Fall of the Imam takes on the religious patriarchal state of Egypt. The Imam at one level is of course Anwar el-Sadat, but also more generally the representative of all religious totalitarianism, and all the characters are symbolic.
Passages of relative realism alternate with and are ultimately replaced by dreamlike or more often nightmarish surrealist chapters, where allusions and metaphors morph into reality (at one point, the Imam becomes King Shahryar of the Thousand and One Nights) and the same episodes repeat endlessly with variations. We see many times the Imam being assassinated and at the end he seems neither dead nor alive. There are many scenes of dark comedy, especially with regard to the Imam, the Great Writer, and the Leader of the Official Opposition; the scenes at the gates of Paradise are a highpoint of the novel.
The book was widely banned for "blasphemy" and Saadawi was threatened by the fundamentalists, eventually spending most of her time in the West.
Sept. 794. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.8 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 350 pages
Mostly variant duplicates and slowed down by a lot of bad poetry (maybe not bad in Arabic but wretched in Burton's English.)
Sept. 1095. Nawal El Saadawi, The Innocence of the Devil [1994, tr. 1994] 284 pages
Written in the same surrealist style as The Fall of the Imam, The Innocence of the Devil is even more confusing. The novel is set in an insane asylum (which, as the introduction by Fedwa Malti-Douglas points out, is also identified with the Garden of Eden). It opens with Ganat, a defiant woman who apparently symbolizes rebellious women in general, being brought into the asylum by the police. She is put into solitary confinement and given electroshock therapy and injections in order to destroy her memory. The other important characters in the asylum include the Head Nurse and the Director, and three inmates, Eblis (the Egyptian spelling of Iblis, the Devil), a man who considers himself God (and may be Ganat's husband Zakaria) and a woman named Nefissa, who partially symbolizes woman as obedient victim of religious patriarchy, though she has her past memories of rebellion as well (and may be the sister of Eblis).
As in other novels by Saadawi, the plot is largely in the form of memories or visions, and we are not always sure which are real memories and which are not; for example, "God" seems to remember having been an important general or other official (in fact he resembles the Imam of the earlier book), but we don't know if he actually was or just imagines he was. We see the interactions of the inmates as children with their parents, grandparents and a male teacher -- they all seem to have been in school together, unless they are simply misidentifying each other with characters in their pasts. Many of the characters in the pasts of the inmates seem to morph into each other or into the Director. A significant theme in all the memories is the religious denigration of women and power relationships between male and female characters. At a symbolic level, Eblis and God may actually be the Devil and the Deity, although at a literal level they are just men. An interesting book, in any case.
Sept. 1196. Naguib Mahfouz, Fountain and Tomb [1975, tr. 1988] 120 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
Fountain and Tomb, also known as Tales from the Neighborhood, is a novel in 78 stories, set in an alley in Cairo from just before the 1919 revolution through the 1920s. The narrator is a young boy at the beginning, although he is remembering the events at a much later time, perhaps in his late fifties. There is no single plot running through the episodes, but we see the daily life of the alley, the love affairs, marriages and domestic relations, and the changes through time -- the demonstrations against the British and the end of the colonial period which are always in the background, the decadence and demise of the gang system, the increase in education, electrification, and so forth. The stories are mainly realistic, although there are some mysterious happenings and the book begins and ends with talking about the unseen Head Sheik of the Sufi convent, a reminiscence of his more allegorical novels.
Sept. 1297. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.9 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 350 pages
Almost to the end of the Nights, these stories were written later than the others and show a falling off of interest; many are near duplicates, especially the last one which is almost identical to the First Lady of Baghdad's tale, but with a male rather than female protagonist. There is also an increase in the overall misogyny of the tales.
The proofreading in this book is alright except for the replacement of characters with accents by Cyrillic letters, "a" with acute accent by Cyrillic "b", "i" with accent by Cyrillic "n" and so forth, probably because they seemed to have that shape to the OCR program they used.. After a while I could guess the original spellings, and it mainly affects proper names and Arabic words in the notes, but it was very annoying in a Project Gutenberg book.
Sept. 1398. Nawal El-Saadawi, Love in the Kingdom of Oil [1993, tr. 2001] 134 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
Another strange, symbolic feminist novel by Nawal El-Saadawi, Love in the Kingdom of Oil is the story of an archaeological researcher who leaves her husband and job and goes "on leave" to search for ancient goddesses in the "Kingdom of Oil", a land literally flooded by oil.
Sept. 1699. Jorge Luis Borges, Fervor de Buenos Aires [1923] 45 pages [in Spanish]
100. Jorge Luis Borges, Luna de Enfrente [1925] 22 pages [in Spanish]
101. Jorge Luis Borges, Cuaderno San Martín [1929] 25 pages [in Spanish]
The World Literature group I am in on Goodreads finished up this month the Arabic literature project (although on my personal list I still have two anthologies and the rest of the 1001 Nights, Naguib Mahfouz and Nawal El-Saadawi to work on) and is moving on to Latin America (perhaps I should say Hispanic America since there are no readings from Brazil), beginning with Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones. Since I use this group as an excuse to read more world literature than is actually part of the group reads, and since I read three collections of Borges' stories about four years ago, including Ficciones, I am going to try to work my way through the Poesía Completa and Cuentos Completos (published in Spanish by Vintage Español) between now and the end of October.
These three short poetry collections are among his earliest writings, published before any of the story collections he is best known for. Fervor de Buenos Aires contains 32 poems, mostly nostalgic and subjective descriptions of Buenos Aires; Luna de Enfrente contains 15, on similar themes; and Cuaderno San Martín contains 10 and is somewhat more diverse (and I think better.) To be honest, though, I was rather disappointed, given that Borges is such an imaginative writer in his short stories and I was expecting something similar in his poetry, which I didn't really find here. He admits in the Prologo to the third book, written in 1969, that the only "autentico" poem in the first two collections was "Llaniza", but I'm not sure what he means by that. In any case, after these three books he turned to writing stories, and his next poetry collection is from thirty years later.
Sept. 19102. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (Richard Burton tr.) v.10 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 350 pages
The tenth and last volume of Burton's translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah) (although there are six supplemental volumes of related materials I still plan to read, this is the end of the actual Nights), this contains the last story, "Ma'aruf the Cobbler and His Wife Fatimah", and the "Conclusion" to the frame story in which King Shahriyar and his brother King Shah Zaman marry Shahrazad (I follow here Burton's spellings of names; she is better known by the French spelling Scheherazade from Galland) and her sister Dunyazad and give up their project of marrying and killing a new wife each night. These make up about 13% of the volume. Most of the book, however, is taken up by Burton's "Terminal Essay" and a series of bibliographic appendices describing various earlier editions and related books. Having completed the entire translation, I will take the opportunity to give my review of the work (the Nights as such), the expression (Burton's translation), and the manifestation (the Project Gutenberg e-books.)
Although written 125 years ago (1882), Burton's description of the origins of the work seem to accord well with the more summary present-day description on Wikipedia, so it is probably essentially correct. The work is described by two tenth-century Arab writers (tenth-century CE; Burton more often uses the traditional Moslem Anno Hegira dates, ordering time from the Flight of Muhammed from Mecca to Medinah rather than from Jesus' fourth birthday as we do), who say it is a translation of a Persian work called the Hazar Afsanah (Thousand Nights -- Wikipedia spells it differently); Burton in a note gives other examples of Arab writers avoiding round numbers. He relates that an early copy of Firdausi's Shahnameh attributes the original Persian work, now lost, to the legendary prehistoric Queen Humái mentioned in Zoroastrian scriptures (a confirmation of the feminist claim that "Anonymous was a woman"?) He argues, against some earlier scholars, that the Arabic translation dates from the end of the eighth century, which would seem to be confirmed by the twentieth-century discovery of a ninth-century MS containing the title and the first few lines of the frame story.
It is not certain how much of the existing versions was derived from the earlier work, apart from Shahriyar, Shahrazad and the frame story; what is certain is that the stories, while often keeping Persian or far-eastern locations and Persian names, have been adapted to Arab customs and Islamic religion. The oldest surviving manuscript is from the fourteenth-century, a Syrian manuscript which was edited by Mahdi and translated by Haddawy at the end of the last century (and which I read and reviewed earlier this year). They maintain (although not all scholars agree) that this Syrian tradition represents the original and stylisticly homogenous core of the work, and that the more recent Egyptian manuscripts on which the other editions and translations have all been based have combined it with originally independent (and inferior) stories. Other scholars consider that this sort of accretion has always been the essence of the work.
I would certainly have to agree that the earlier stories form a coherent group which interact in the manner required by the frame story, while the later stories are more heterogeneous and the division into nights is fairly arbitrary. The order of the stories seems to go roughly from earliest to latest, as new stories were added to the end, and the latest stories may have been revised if not written as late as the sixteenth century with mentions of coffee (16 times, according to Burton's count) and once of tobacco smoking. The early stories are also the most constant, while the selection of later stories varies from manuscript to manuscript. The Voyages of Sindbad were a late addition, although probably written early as a separate work. Some of the other best-known "Arabian Nights" such as Aladdin and the Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves were added by Galland from an unknown source and do not seem to be in any Arabic MS of the work (they are not in Burton but may be in the supplements which I haven't read yet). The tales were first translated into a Western language by Antoine Galland (I read and reviewed his version earlier this year as well; it is a classic of French literature as well as a translation.) The tales were ignored by the Arab intellectual elite as merely popular literature until they became known and gained scholarly attention in the West; the earliest printed editions in Arabic, the Bulaq and Calcutta editions, came out after Galland and other early translations in Western languages, and it was not until the twentieth century that they became an important influence on modern Arabic writers.
Burton points out that one of the major accomplishments of the editors who compiled the Nights was the way they mixed various genres to avoid monotony in such a long collection; would that modern anthologists all followed their example. He lists the major genres, and Salma Khadra Jayyusi in the introduction to her anthology of Modern Arabic Fiction, which I am reading currently, ascribes the same genres to classic Arabic literature as a whole. The earliest genre and the one which predominates in the oldest tales is the mythic tale of djinns and magic, which to me and I think to most Western readers of the Nights is the most entertaining; another very old genre is the beast fable which in the West we associate with Aesop, but which is ubiquitous throughout all the inhabited continents from the earliest times to the present. There are one or two tales which could be considered as romances in the mediaeval sense, tales of chivalry with a love element, and there are many love stories as such as well. There are the seemingly realistic anecdotes centered about historical figures, especially associated with Haroun al-Rashid and his court, which Jayyusi calls al-Khabar and attributes to the early Moslem (lifetime of the Prophet and the Umayyad caliphs) rejection of false or fictional stories and which range from the pornographic to the moralistic, and what Burton calls "detective stories" and Jayyusi calls "Assemblies" or al-Maqamat (stories about rogues and human tricksters). There are also stories that are mainly excuses for verse, and didactic tales with very little plot, which have a different, more anthropological kind of interest.
The earliest English translations were rather illiterate second-hand works, translations of Galland's and other French translations; they were followed by the expurgated text of Lane and the unfinished work of Payne which Burton revised in the first volumes of the present work. (Wikipedia talks about "plagiarism", but since Burton uses Payne very openly and with his permission, I don't see the problem. All including Burton were based on the printed Bulaq and Calcutta editions rather than on the original manuscripts and are not in any sense critical editions, despite Burton's extensive notes about the language and customs. Burton translates into a very idiosyncratic and archaizing English, although critics of the work exaggerate the difficulty; it's not that hard to follow. As I noted in my review of Haddawy, this is not Disney, and there is a fair amount of racism and misogyny, especially in the later tales; actually Burton's opinions in the notes are often much more offensive than anything in the text itself. The translation was privately printed and "not published" because of the sexual content; Burton is sometimes accused of having exaggerated this, especially in his notes, but I don't really see that except for one section of the Terminal Essay where he gets carried away with a worldwide history of homosexuality.
I read the stories from about the middle of volume 2 to somewhere in volume 5 in a printed edition, about which there isn't much to say -- it dates from when proofreading was taken for granted. The rest were in free e-books from Project Gutenberg, which seem to be the source for most of the low-cost editions in the Kindle store. Project Gutenberg in general has better proofreading than most free or low-cost e-books, but the volume 2 here was a dismal exception, as I said in the review of that volume. Otherwise, the only problem was that some volumes had random Cyrillic letters in place of accented characters and some omitted these characters altogether.
Sept. 20103. Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days [1979, tr. 1995] 227 pages
The next chronologically in my reading of Mahfouz, I held off reading this until I had finished The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf Laylah wa-Laylah). While the translation uses the English title Arabian Nights, the Arabic title is Layali alf Laylah which I assume is Thousand and One Nights or something close to that. I wasn't sure what the relationship to the mediaeval work would be, whether a modern retelling or what, but in fact it uses the characters and events from some of the best-known tales, though not necessarily in the same way as the original, but puts them into a single narrative story. As with other novels of Mahfouz, the plot seems to cycle over and over as one corrupt regime is overthrown by a less corrupt one which then becomes corrupt in turn and is overthrown and so on. The novel begins the last night of the original work with King Shahriyer marrying Scheherazade amidst the celebrations of the populace in a city which resembles the timeless "alleys" of his other allegorical novels. The populace contains many of the characters from the stories and the book proceeds from the merchant who inadvertently insults a djinn to the imposture of Ma'aruf the Cobbler before adding a new ending about the repentance of King Shariyar. The theme of the novel seems to be human free agency and human responsibility despite the interference of the djinni.
Sept. 23104. Jorge Luis Borges, Historia Universal de la Infamia [1935] 81 pages [in Spanish]
Borges' first collection of short stories, this is a re-read for me; I read it for the first time about four years ago, and it apparently didn't make much of an impression on me then -- my review was one sentence, which just indicated the contents. I came back to it as part of a project to read all of Borges' poetry and short stories, and right after reading Arabic fiction and especially the 1001 Nights over the past year, it seemed like a different book altogether (a Borgesian idea after all.)
Salma Khadra Jayyusi in the Introduction to a book I am working my way through now (Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology) mentions Borges in the following comment: "Jorge Luis Borges, who studied Arabic, was genuinely influenced by the Arab-Islamic heritage. He used the method of khaber and isnad in his own work, basing it on his knowledge of this type of Arab narrative." This is perhaps truer of this book than any other. Like the Arab genre, it consists of historical anecdotes, rewritten in a literary style. Here, stories about famous, or infamous, criminals: the slave-stealer Lazarus Morrell, the imposter Tom Castro, the pirate the widow Ching, the New York gangster Monk Eastman, Billy the Kid, the villain of the 47 Ronins Katsuké no Suké, and a Moslem heretic I had never heard of, Hakim of Merv (apparently a very fictionalized account of the Khorasian rebel al-Muqammi). To this original group of "stories" he added one wholly original story, "El hombre de la Esquina Rosada", about two gunslingers in New Mexico, written in dialect with many words I was unable to find in my dictionary -- it wasn't difficult to follow the basic plot, but I couldn't translate it word for word if I had to, and three very short stories again based on sources including the 1001 Nights.
This edition -- from the Cuentos completos -- for some reason omits the last one page story about the map that was in the separate edition I read last time around.
Sept. 26105. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones [1944] 139 pages [in Spanish]
Re-read
Sept. 29106. G.K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit: G.K. Chesterton on William Shakespeare [2012] 320 pages
This anthology is a collection of excerpts from the books and articles (and one or two unpublished manuscripts) of G.K. Chesterton which are concerned with Shakespeare, selected by the editor, Dale Ahlquist; Ahlquist says in his introduction that Chesterton had been commissioned to write a book on Shakespeare but died before he could begin writing it. I have never read anything else by Chesterton, and all I knew about him was that he was a politically conservative Catholic who wrote rather literate detective stories (not a genre I am particularly interested in) and a book on Thomas Aquinas. Most of these selections are only one or two pages long, and some are only one or two sentences. There is a lot here that struck me as frankly silly or stupid, especially when he discusses social issues, but there are also some very intelligent comments about Shakespeare and the Elizabethan era. The style is often humorous and occasionally facetious.
Perhaps the best selection was the first one, where he argues that English culture is fundamentally classical and south European rather than "Teutonic" as some people apparently claimed; throughout the book there are negative comments about "German professors" (many of the selections were written during or just after the First World War.) The most annoying (apart from his political and religious comments) were his anti-intellectualism (claiming to be "uncultured" and to represent the opinions of the general public against the educated minority) and the way he uses "modern" as the ultimate insult. He considers that Shakespeare was obviously a Catholic, but gives no real arguments for it. There is a whole section of the book arguing with George Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare, and the last section is devoted to refuting the Baconians.
In short, very mixed but a quick read and probably worth the time to read.
Sept. 30107. Naguib Mahfouz, Wedding Song [1981, tr. 1984] 134 pages
A short novel, Wedding Song is at first sight a detective story; it opens with the producer, director, and actors of a theater discussing a new play with the name Wedding Song which they are going to put on. The play is written by Abbas Younis, who has never before written a good play; the characters of this are the very people of the theater itself, and the plot of the play seems to the has-been or rather never-was actor Tariq Ramadan (a personal enemy of the playwright) to be a confession that Abbas has murdered his wife (Tariq's former mistress Tahiya) and his infant child. Abbas, however, has apparently disappeared.
The story is narrated through memories in the first chapter by Ramadan. The novel then turns in successive chapters to Abbas' father Karam (a former prompter in the theater), his mother Halima (a former cashier), and the playwright himself; each chapter tells the same story differently from their perspectives. What emerges from the combination is a sordid tale of poverty and exploitation, with the characters all misjudging each other and themselves by never seriously seeking to understand or sympathize with each other. The book ends, rather than actually concludes, like many of Mahfouz' works in his postmodernist style, with a strange scene not in any way prepared.
Oct. 3 108. Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Nightwith Notes Anthropological and Explanatory (Richard Burton ed.) v.1 [Kindle, Project Gutenberg] approx. 350 pages
The first of six supplemental volumes containing material which is not in the Bulaq edition Burton translated in the ten volumes of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (which I have just finished reading); some may be included in various MSS of the Nights and some represent the kind of independent story which the Nights were formed from.
According to Burton's Foreword, the first two volumes of the supplement are actually a revision of the three volumes of John Payne's Tales from the Arabic, which contain stories from the printed Breslau edition and the Calcutta edition which are not in the Bulaq edition.
The first tale, "The Sleeper and the Waker", in which a poor man called Abu Hassan is fooled into thinking he is the Caliph (and which may be the source for Shakespeare's Christopher Sly at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew), is one of the eleven stories added by Galland in his translation to the core stories (the only one for which an Arab source had been found when Burton wrote his notes; I don't know whether others have been found since.) Several of the shorter tales which follow were translated in the continuation of Galland by Dom Chavis and M. Cazotte.
The two longest parts of the book are "The Ten Wazirs, or the History of King Azadbakht and his Son" (derived from the Persian Bakhtyar Nameh and "King Shah Bakht and his Wazir Al-Rahwan", both collections of tales with frame stories obviously derived from Persian originals. Some of the tales in these collections seem to be abridged or truncated versions of tales which were included at greater length in the Bulaq edition; there are obvious non sequiturs and one tale, "The Tale of the Falcon and the Locust", makes no sense whatever.
52-54. Antoine Galland, tr., Mille et Une Nuits [1704] tome 1 529 pages; tome 2 488 pages; tome 3 544 pages [Kindle, in French]
The first translation of the Thousand and One Nights into a Western language, published between 1704 and 1717 in twelve volumes. I'm guessing that that is why the three volumes I read are titled first, second and third of twelve, even though comparing the contents to the list of stories on Wikipedia these three volumes contain the entire contents of the twelve original volumes. The first half of the book is a fairly close translation of the original Syrian version which I read last month in the recent English translation by Haddawy; I was surprised how close it was, the only adaptation really was omitting the poetry, which doesn't really work in translation, and some of the more explicit sexual or scatological passages which weren't in accord with eighteenth century French taste. The second half of the book contains other stories which were part of the Egyptian versions or originally independent stories -- the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, Aladdin and the Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, among others. Galland's translation is worth reading as a classic of French as well as Arabic literature.