The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (c. 900)

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter

The second book on the list is a traditional Japanese story called “Taketori Monogatari” or “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”. It was written by an unknown author in the ninth or tenth century and as far as I understand it exists in a number of different versions.

The version I found was only ten pages long and a part of an anthology of early science fiction (!) stories edited by David Lear. From the mammoth and encyclopedic “1001 nights” that can only be read in abbreviated form to a tiny story that I wish had been blown up into something more. What a difference.

Yet I found this tiny story absolutely delightful and it is easily the best of the eight stories included in the anthology.

In this story a poor bamboo cutter finds a tiny girl in his field. He takes her in and raises her as his daughter and she is growing fast, like really fast. Soon she is a beautiful woman and of such radiance that her fame spreads widely. She gets many suitors, but she gives in to none of them. Instead she gives the most persistent of them impossible tasks they cannot complete. Finally even the emperor of Japan becomes interest in her. When she refuses his invitation he seeks her out and is captivated by her. Kaguya, as the girl is called, claims that she will die if she leaves her home, which means that the emperor cannot have her either. In the end however she is visited by her family from the moon who takes her away in their spaceship.

I would call this a classic fairy tale with a twist.

Frankly I did not see that part with the spaceship coming, but that explains why it is included in a science fiction anthology. At first this sounds like something Monty Python could have made, but when you read the story it makes perfect sense and it is written in beautiful prose that makes it the sweetest story ever and not like my brutal synopsis above.

The style is quite different from the formulaic fairy tales from the west, but whether it represents a typical style of Japanese stories I really cannot tell. This is my first Japanese fairy tale ever. There are none of the repetitions typical of this kind of story and the story arc also lacks the classic climax. She is not marrying the emperor or becoming crazy rich, but, ta-da, she just goes home to the moon. Exactly what that is supposed to mean I am not sure, except that she represents something otherworldly which can be admired, but never owned or ruled by mortal men.

By some crazy coincidence it turns out that there is a Japanese cartoon called “Princess Kaguya” from 2013 and released in Denmark just yesterday. I was listening to a movie show on the radio when they suddenly started talking about it and I realized it was the very same story that I had just been reading. Except that the 10 pages had become a 2½ hour movie. I think that beats even “The Hobbit” for inflation. So far I have not seen the movie, but the trailer is awesome. It looks like a beautiful movie made in traditional Japanese drawing style and somehow that fits this story just perfectly.

I am dying to know how they have made the spaceship exit…

For a ten page read “The tale of the Bamboo Cutter” is surprisingly rewarding and it is so easy a read that it is almost criminal not to read it. I recommend it.

The Thousand And One Nights (c.850)

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.

Welcome to the 1001 book blog

Welcome to my 1001 book blog

The intention with this blog is to go through chronologically the books listed in “1001 Books You Must Read Before You die”. It is an audacious task and there is just nowhere I am going to complete it, but it is a fun project so let us see how far I get. I hope for a long life.

I am an avid reader albeit a slow one, but tend to stay safely within my comfort zone. Since 2010 I have been watching movies chronologically from “1001 Movies You Must See Before You die” (and written about it since 2012) and that has opened my eyes to a wonderful world outside my comfort zone. I figure that something similar is probably true about litterature and that the 1001 list will give me plenty of quality titles that I have never heard of. Who knows what I will find out there and that is the fun of it.

This is also going to be a journey through history. Where the movie blog covers only the last 110 years the book list will cover more than a thousand years and doing it chronologically will enable me to see how literature evolve over time. This very much appeals to my interest in history.

There are several editions of the list. As far as I can tell the latest version is more strictly literature compared to earlier versions that included other types of prose. That suits me well as I have no intention of delving into religious, juridical or technical writings although it saddens me that I will likely miss historical or mythological accounts like Jordanes, Bede and Saxo. You cannot have it all. In any case whereas the movie list is an evolving one, I have decided to make the book list a static agenda and not include books from later or earlier editions.

My pace will be slow, 3 to 4 books per year is a likely estimate, but I am okay with that. The important thing is that it remains a fun project. If you decide to follow this project, please, be my guest. I welcome all comments.