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Summary
Summary
A renowned Nobel Prize-winning novelist refashions the classic tales of Scheherazade in his own imaginative, spellbinding style. Here are genies and flying carpets, Aladdin and Sinbad, Ali Baba, and many other familiar stories, made new by the magical pen of the acknowledged dean of Arabic letters.
Author Notes
Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo, Egypt on December 11, 1911. He received a degree in philosophy from the University of Cairo. He took on several civil service and government department jobs to supplement his income while writing, but retired from that career in 1971.
During his lifetime, he wrote more than 30 novels including The Games of Fate, The Cairo Trilogy, Children of Gebelawi, The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail, Small Talk on the Nile, and Miramar. He received numerous awards including the Egyptian State Prize, the Presidential Medal from the American University in Cairo, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. He died as a result of a head injury on August 30, 2006 at the age of 94.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
First published in Arabic in 1979, these 17 interlinked, eloquent tales, loosely based on the classic Arabian Nights, reveal a more playful side of Pulitzer Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Mahfouz. Dispensing with the plot device whereby Scheherazade spins 1001 successive tales, Mahfouz weaves an entertaining arabesque of intrigue, betrayal, obsessive love, social injustice, reincarnations and wrongs righted or made worse. Here, free choice and the burden of circumstance are pieces of a mosaic shaped by fate and God's unpredictable ways. In ``Sindbad,'' the legendary adventurer recounts his seven voyages, drawing radical lessons from them (``To continue with worn-out traditions is foolishly dangerous''). In ``Aladdin with the Moles on His Cheeks,'' humble barber Aladdin and a sheikh discuss the proper way to live and worship. With his usual psychological acuity and a keen sense of social and political realities, Mahfouz delivers a revised classic that skewers hypocrisy, greed and corruption, especially of those in power. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An austerely modern reworking of The Thousand and One Nights- -the most magical work yet set into English by Egyptian Nobel laureate Mahfouz (The Harafish, 1994, etc.). Although these intertwined fables are, like the volume that inspired them, set in the past, they deal with all-too-modern consequences of fairy-tale adventures. In ``Nur Al-Din and Dunyazad,'' peerless storyteller Shahrzad's sister dreams of the perfume seller and wakens to find herself pregnant by him, with all the contemporary burdens of unwanted pregnancy. In ``Sanaan al- Gamali,'' a merchant, purchasing his life from a genie he has crossed, is ordered to kill the corrupt governor; but when Sanaan goes to see him, the governor, every inch the modern wheeler- dealer, asks if he can marry Sanaan's daughter, offers his own daughter as a bride for Sanaan's son, and announces his plan to sign an enormous contract with one of Sanaan's relatives. In ``The Cap of Invisibility,'' a righteous man accepts a magical gift on the condition that he be allowed to do ``anything except what [his] conscience dictates''; he then faces moral dilemmas the original Arabian Nights never dreamed of. This is a world of endless transformations: A buried girl is brought back to life; after being executed, a governor is reincarnated as a porter and finds himself wooing his own wife; a sultan passes into an otherworldly domain of love and bliss in which he can't remain. The only certainties are the cruel whims of the genies (``The best would be if she were to be killed, and her father were to commit suicide,'' muses one of them) and the ritual executions of corrupt governors, private secretaries, chiefs of police. The obvious comparison in English is John Barth's Chimera--but Mahfouz's greater faith in old-fashioned narrative allows him to weave modernist psychology and legendary rhetoric, making his Arabian Nights both disturbing and spellbinding.
Library Journal Review
Anyone with suspicions about the fairy tale tag "They lived happily ever after" will have them confirmed here. The latest translation of Mahfouz (winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature) is a clever, witty concoction that begins on the day following the Thousand and One Nights, when the vizier Dandan learns that his daughter, Shahrzad, has succeeded in saving her life by enthralling the sultan with wondrous tales. But Shahrzad is miserable and distrusts her husband, who, she suspects, is still capable of bloody doings. All is not well outside the palace either, where a medieval Islamic city teems with anxious souls. Many of them, like the devout Skeikh Abdullah al-Balkhi, strive to attain a high spiritual station, but few succeed, especially when genies and angels intervene, as they do often in this series of linked intrigues and adventures. Mahfouz succeeds splendidly with this fantasy, which should appeal to a wide readership. [Mahfouz is recovering from an October 14th Knife attack by alleged Islamic militants.-Ed.]-Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
