The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights

I’ve tried reading the Arabian Nights before, from a couple of selections that are around. Though the one selection started off promisingly (erotic and violent as we have been led to believe), I was soon bored, and the other volume was not well translated and the choice even less enticing. Actually, only now can I say that the choice was unenticing. Then, as I far as I might have known, all the stories could have been dull. But now I’ve started the complete new Penguin edition,  published in 3 gorgeous hard back volumes (almost 3,000 pages together) and I’m completely hooked. I read them at night before I go to sleep and this is far from ideal. The book is so heavy it’s hard to manipulate from a prone position, and each story ends on such a cliff hanger it’s difficult to put the volume down. So, hard to keep the volume up AND hard to put it down.

It gives you a much better idea of the work as a whole to read from the beginning than to jump around in some selection. A major part of the delight of these stories is how one story is embedded into another, and that into another and so on. I’ve just read the three individual stories of how three one-eyed men all arrived on the same night at the home of three beautiful and bizarre young women, but this is already a story so embedded in other stories that I can no longer remember where the story began or what loose ends are left dangling (if any). There was a moment in the last of these three stories when the protagonist met ten one-eyed men, and I wondered if we might then hear each of their stories. I had thought this boxed set was perhaps going to remain as beautiful wallpaper in my study, but now I think there’s a good chance that in the next couple of years I may read the lot. No chance of taking it on a plane alas. It was reading Proust that first got me (and my friend and Proust-reading partner Jane) interested in the Arabian Nights. They pop up in his great long novel from time to time, though having said that I can’t remember where, and now I wonder if mostly they make an appearance in the last volume, the volume we are about to re-read. Jane and I are making our second go through Proust (and my third). I think we both know now that Proust is for life (well our lives anyway), even given the shocking discovery that the second part of volume five is a drastic falling off. Volume five is made out of the loosely connected parts The Prisoner and The Fugitive. The Prisoner is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the whole cycle, just as The Fugitive is undoubtedly its low point. It really isn’t possible to read a novel this long and get an idea of even its architecture the first time round. Each time I’m enjoying the novel as a whole more, and feeling more confident that I can say where its strengths and weaknesses lie: this does not lessen the pleasure so much as focus it. Now the great passages arrive like jewels hung in ghastly night, or like arias in some great opera (and all operas, even the greatest have their longeurs). Of course, I am not infallible. I was convinced the last time round that there were many more longeurs in the novel than in fact there are. Sometimes a longeur turns out to be this reader’s lack of concentration. I’m pretty confident this isn’t the reason I have it in for The Fugitive. The author doesn’t seem to be in control of his material at this point. I’m sure he would have revised it heavily if he had lived or had the energy. The Fugitive was published posthumously. The chapters here don’t hang together. In fact I’m suspicious that thee are chapters when there have been no such shortish chapters in previous volumes. Despite many references to  his long held desire to be in Venice, and the obstacles that get in the way of fulfilling that desire, suddenly in The Fugitive we finish one chapter only to find ourselves in the next in Venice without a by or leave.  I do hope form returns with the last volume. My memory is that it is one of the finest volumes of all. I’m eager to test my memory, and create new memories to be further tested in the future. (Why is that  Proust trails pretentiousness. To say that I am reading Proust for the third time sounds utterly pretentious. But Proust is hugely entertaining, wise, profound. And long. He has to be read over and again. Apparently Virginia Woolf oncee wrote that Remembrance of Things Past was the greatest novel ever written. Recent scholarship suggests that she cold not have read more than the first couple of volumes. This has been used against her. But really! That’s still over a thousand pages. Surely enough for the pronouncement to hold.)