Arabian Nights & Days

What's the title? Arabian Nights & Days

Who wrote it? Naguib Mahfouz, tr. Denys Johnson-Davies

When was it written? 1981

What star rating would I give it? 2/5

Would I recommend it? No. I would not recommend this particular book, but if you find a different translation I would say give it a try and I definitely recommend Naguib Mahfouz in general.

What's it about? (non-spoilers) Arabian Nights & Days is heavily inspired by 1001 Nights and follows the fantastic adventures of the citizens in a town in Shahryar’s kingdom after the mad king’s reformation at the hands of Scheherazade.

What did you think? (spoilers) I thought I was going to love this book. I studied the 1001 Nights while in college and I loved pretty much everything we watched and read in that class. I was assigned Naguib Mahfouz several times over the course of my college career and enjoyed him every time he came across my syllabus. This book should have been tailored to my literary sweet spots. Great author plus beloved subject matter equals happy reader; it’s not a complicated equation. The only problem is that I really, really did not enjoy this book. The book is less than 250 pages, but it took me almost two months to slog my way through. I had to force myself to read it. And yes, I had some problems with the story itself.

Perhaps most egregious for me was the book’s treatment of its female characters. It’s been a while, but I remember the female characters in Palace Walk to be well rounded and as fully fleshed-out and three-dimensional as their male counterparts. Whereas in Arabian Nights the women are essentially props for its sausage fest of a leading cast. There are a few expectations to this, but you have to look for them, and, perhaps, Mahfouz was trying to ape the flatness of fairytales and that’s why the women are by and large so inhumane. But, again, while it’s been several years since I've read the text, I remember the women in Scheherazade’s tales to be complex and full of agency. There’s also Scheherazade herself – one of the greatest female characters in all of literature and you can fight me on that – and she barely makes a presence in this book while her homicidal husband gets plenty of page time. How do you do that? How do you sideline Scheherazade from a tale about 1001 Nights? That’s like having a Cinderella story without Cinderella or a Mulan story without Mulan. Why would you do that?

In addition to the female representation, the other major qualm I had with the book was that it felt like the text was trying to be didactic about – something – perhaps the goodness and evil of mankind and maybe the just and moral nature of Allah. The stories felt very “moral-of-the-story” but weren’t clear enough for me to ever get the moral. Now, granted, that could be more on me than on the book. Maybe I’m just dense or don’t have the cultural/religious context to parse out the novel’s messages. Or maybe the stories were mere stories and weren’t trying to teach any lesson, but they sure felt like they did, which made for a frustrating read.

Now despite these qualms, I strongly suspect that my problems would have been less egregious had the novel had a different translator. I know translation is a thankless job that gets very little credit despite being incredibly difficult and even when they elevate the work they’re translating it’s the original author that gets all the credit and yet if a novel is seen as sub par they get the blame. This is untenable and unfortunate. However, my suspicions stand. I’ve read this author’s work before and always enjoyed him. On Goodreads the book stands at an average rating of 4.10, which is bounds above the 2 stars I gave it, and I noticed that most of the reviews of the book are written in Arabic. Clearly, the original text is speaking to audiences that the translation was incapable of speaking to me. One could speculate that this is a result of cultural context – Arabic readers responding to the Egyptian author in a way I can’t – except for the fact that I have always responded to Mahfouz’s writing in the past. Perhaps Arabian Nights was never destined to be my favorite of Mahfouz’s works. Maybe the qualms I had while reading I would have had even if I'd read the original text. But I can’t help but feel that, given another translation, I could have at least enjoyed Arabian Nights.

As it stands, I will still pick up Mahfouz’s books in the future. I just may avoid the ones translated by Johnson-Davies.

Images: Goodreads

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