Arabian Nights and Days

Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mafouz (fiction, 228 pages)

(Please note: In this review, spellings differ from my review of Arabian Nights below. In each case, I used the spellings of the edition.)

My first experience with Naguib Mahfouz was his wondrous Cairo Trilogy, a saga of three generations of an Egyptian family from WWI to the overthrow of King Farouk I in the 1950s. He stopped writing for a time after that, and his work when he resumed was more allegorical and existential. As a reader, I have struggled to understand Mahfouz’s underlying messages in his later work, with mixed success.

Such is the case with my experience of Arabian Nights and Days. I could definitely appreciate it on the surface, and I understood some of what he was getting at, but I felt that the true meaning was tantalizingly beyond my grasp.

Arabian Nights and Days picks up where Arabian Nights left off, after the sultan Shahriyar renounces his former bloodthirsty ways and looks forward to a long married life with Shahrzad. Although she does not voice it to the sultan, Shahrzad does not meet this new attitude of Shahriyar’s with unalloyed joy, since his renunciation of his past acts does not erase the bloody past. Also, his reign of terror has resulted in a city where the good, for the most part, are dead or have fled, and the remaining citizens (and their governors) have more than their fair share of corruption.

The story that follows is a struggle between the inhabitants of the town, human and genie alike, towards good or evil. Shahriyar, going beyond mere words, often goes out into the city in disguise at night, attempting to bring himself closer to goodness. Many of Shahrzad’s stories find life in the town, and many characters from them reappear in different guise. The characters (and the readers) learn lessons of goodness, and strive (but do not always succeed) to follow them.

Mahfouz does not follow an easy path, and there are no easy answers or endings in this book. As always, his writing is beautiful and contains much to think about. There were several passages I read over again, to savor the words and the meaning behind them. This is a book I will turn to again, in hopes of understanding more.

2669 / 36600 pages. 7% done!

6 / 7 owned prior to 2008. 86%!

2 / 25 nonfiction. 8%!

2 / 7 global/translation. 29%!