The Thousand and One Night
The very
first book on the ”1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” list is “The
Thousand and One Nights”. It is quite fitting to begin a canon of the most
important literature with a collection of stories that has stood the test of
time since antiquity. Frankly I am surprised that no literature from
Greco-Roman antiquity made the list, but I am okay starting here. “The Thousand
and One Night” is a good opening. Hey, this is a thousand and one list, after
all!
Everybody
know of “The Thousand and one Night” and most people will probably even know
that it is a collection of stories of Middle Eastern origin. Fewer people may
realize that it is a framework of stories that has evolved over time, that
there is no single origin of the collection and that even the content of
stories vary from edition to edition. If you read it you will be getting a
sample, a particular selection of stories from one of the many renditions that
exist. Another reader my therefore end up reading something rather different
than what I went though.
My edition
is the Penguin Classics “Tales from the Thousand and One Night” translated by
N.J. Dawood and contain fourteen selected stories from a seventeenth century
version from Cairo.
“The
Thousand and One Night” is an interesting read for several reasons. First of
all these are vivid and very graphic stories, almost irreverent. They are meant
to be told so they do not dally on details, but move on at a rapid pace that
makes the stories almost page-turners. I found myself entertained and almost
never bored reading it.
Secondly
many of the stories are very well known, but in versions that are quite
different from the original (as far as you can talk about an original).
Everybody knows “Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp”, but the actual story is quite
different from the Disney version and reading the story behind all those modern
renditions is very interesting indeed.
Thirdly a
book like “The Thousand and One Night” is a window into another culture and
another age. The stories reflect the ideals, the dreams and the moral codes of
these people. As a representative of modern western culture I am sometimes
perplexed, even confused at the sentiment behind the stories, but even at their
most confusing I still get the idea (mostly).
Surprisingly
the stories are almost void of moral lessons. These stories seem to be told
with the intent to entertain, not to provide a lesson. At least I was mostly
unable to find the lesson. In most western traditional stories there is a
lesson behind: Hybris – Nemesis, the humble shall succeed, bad guys get their
comeuppance etc. But I could not find that in these stories. Mostly there is a
hero of the story who will get in an awful lot of trouble, but miraculously he
will succeed and win riches, power and women. That frankly sound more like
Hollywood than The Brothers Grimm and this may also be why the stories hold up
to day.
What holds
up less good is the callousness of practically all the characters. Small
slights are almost always punished with violence. People are killed in an
offhand manner with hardly a consequence and not just by the bad guys. Physical
abuse seems to be the most natural reaction to almost anything. Women are
usually promiscuous and are killed outright. Slaves are disposed of casually.
Ships will founder losing all men but the hero with hardly a mention (Sindbad
the Sailor seems to have lost close to a thousand people in that manner without
any regrets). I find it a bit difficult to swallow and even in a cartoonish
presentation it leaves me with a bad taste.
You can see
how wealth is foremost in peoples dream. The heroes find extreme wealth and it
always comes out of nowhere. You just wake up one day and you have all you ever
dreamed of. The agent of wealth is usually a jinn, a magical creature often
captured in a ring or a lamp, but just as often a free agent who decides to
bestow favors on our hero. There is nothing about earning your wealth through
labor or craftsmanship. It is more like winning in lotto. Back then as today
that is a common dream. The hero may lose his wealth again, but not through an
easy-come-easy-go morality. That happens through their adversaries or simply
through random events. Usually however they earn it back, just as lucky as they
got it in the first place, or in a few places through cunning.
Most of all
the stories are incredible. They are meant to amaze the audience. Everything is
bigger, richer and more outlandish than imaginable. So much so that at times
this much-with-more-on-top gets almost tiresome, like a modern superhero tale.
With jinns/superpowers like these there is no challenge and the story loses
interest. Yet most of the stories manage to strike the balance and remain
entertaining.
All in all
a good beginning to this quest. This is a recommended read, maybe even
essential and certainly a lot of fun.
