Good evening, Shahrazad

Nights 1-16

Welcome to the first week’s reading! I found the first sixteen nights to be delightful.

First, for those reading along: this is long! The first sixteen nights are 100 pages, and the next sixteen are 150 pages. I was expecting only 40-50 pages per week. This is true on average, but the first thirty nights are much longer than the others.

The text is often shocking. On the first page, a king is cuckolded when his wife sleeps with a “black slave.” I was surprised to see the black/white racial dichotomy in the Arabian Nights; it shows up again. 

The salacious material kept coming: there is group sex in the next few pages, and then the king “deflowers” our heroine Shahrazad. In a later story, a man is asked to give different names to a woman’s privates. This book is not child-friendly.

The overall structure takes some getting used to. I think most readers will know the “frame story:” Shahrazad tells the king a different story each night, but never finishes her stories until the next night, so the king can’t execute her because of the suspense of not knowing the ending. This frustrates the reader as well. As a reader, I like to stop at the natural chapter breaks. But the natural breaks are not at the end of each night. They’re hidden between the nights, when a story flows from one to the next. Even more difficult, the reader needs to keep track of stories within stories. There is a helpful appendix at the end of the book that maps the layers.

There are some hints that the stories may become repetitive. But not yet in the first hundred pages. Some of them differ in style significantly. One of the early stories seems like an Aesop’s Fable or part of the Panchatantra: a wisdom story told using animal behavior. Later, we get one of my favorites where a witch battles an ifrit (pp. 86-89, Night 14). They are very different; it’s like reading Metamorphoses (another one of my favorites). I wonder if by the end of it, it will feel like The Golden Legend where one saint’s story started to feel a lot like another saint’s story that we had already read.

Several Magic cards have made an appearance so far. Here’s a quick list of the more distinct names: Shahrazad (p. 7, before Night 1), Bottle of Suleiman (pp. 21-22, Night 3), King Suleiman (p. 23), Magnetic Mountain (p. 91, Night 14), Brass Man (pp. 91-93, Night 14). I expect we’ll see them all again. Furthermore, there are plenty of Magic cards that may not match so clearly to specific stories. So far, I’ve seen Bedouin highwaymen that could be “Erg Raiders” (p. 72, Night 12), a black horse that could serve as “Ebony Horse” (p. 103, Night 16), mounted soldiers that could be “Moorish Cavalry,” dust clouds that could be either a “Sandstorm” or a “Desert Twister”, a “Desert”, a “Camel”, more than one “Merchant Ship,” and a character that exhibits “Piety” (Night 1, p. 11). There have also been a djinn and an efreet. Going forward, I’ll likely only note those like “magnetic mountain” that feel distinct.

One last note on the Magic cards. I have a pretty good knowledge of the Arabian Nights set, but it is not so ingrained in my head that I can promise I will think of the basic cards like “Oasis” when they first appear in the set. But I did notice a character that could be one of my favorite cards from the set. In Nights 7-9, we meet a witch who is technically a Sorceress Queen. She cheats on her husband, and is described by her black lover as “stinking bitch, vilest of the whites” (p. 43). It’s fun to encounter these characters in these ways. The art from Sorceress Queen in Magic is cartoonish. You wouldn’t think to call her vile or a bitch. It’s like reading Collodi’s Pinocchio for the first time after only knowing the Disney movie. It is shocking to see the wooden boy kill Jiminy Cricket! Similarly, the source material here is much darker than the game that I know.

Programming Note: I had planned to publish this in January, but I discovered the reading is very front-loaded. I decided to move this up. That way, I can spread the next 150 pages over a more manageable two weeks.