Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not a Typical Anthology, 5 Dec 2008
This book was published in 1989, with a revised version in 2002. The latter is the one I read. The first half of the book contained a brief survey of conditions faced in the 1960s and 70s by short story writers in the Arab world, mainly in Egypt, as well as long commentaries on the pieces anthologized in the rest of the book. The stories appeared at the end, and comprised fewer than half the total pages.
There were 15 works by 14 writers mainly from Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and also Iraq and Kuwait. The pieces included a short play written in the 1930s, three poems written in the 1950s and 60s, and short stories, most of which were from the 1960s and 70s. Capsule biographies for the authors weren't included, and in some cases it was unclear where they were from, even though the editor said some of the writers weren't well known.
Among the problems mentioned during the 1960s and 70s were the oppressive effects of censorship and the accompanying lack of responsible publishers and critics. (The revised edition, published in 2002, said the censorial atmosphere remained.) The editor suggested that stories in the collection drew on folktales and allegory in part to evade censors' restrictions.
All the works contained themes or heroes from folktales of the region, which were chosen to support the editor's argument that the modern Arabic short story was "not altogether an imitation of the Western genre." Many of the works incorporated Sindbad, a hero drawn from the Persian/Arabic classic, The Book of the 1,001 Nights. Maybe this was one reason the book's subtitled "Shahrazad Returns," referring to the legendary storyteller of the Nights.
For me, the most interesting piece was the short play written in the 1930s by Michael Aflaq, who later co-founded the socialist, nationalist Baath Party. Rather than portray Sindbad as an adventurous hero, it showed him at home at the end of his life, old, poor and mocked by his neighbors for having neglected his family, wandered around the world and squandered his wealth. Another story, "Antarah Ibn Zabibah," by Faysal Khartash, took a legendary hero from the pre-Islamic era and moved him into the region in modern times, where he was arrested and broken for criticizing the government, and ended up wandering the streets, reciting poetry in cafes and scribbling his name on city walls. Too many of the other pieces were rather hard to follow or understand, though the commentaries helped to an extent.
Both the editor's writing and, I think, the stories assumed a certain level of familiarity both with characters in Arabic folklore and the situation in the 1960s and 70s. Particularly in the editor's conclusion, such familiarity might have allowed some statements to be better understood. In the conclusion, for example, he criticized another translator's statement that "Marxist commitment and existentialism are two attitudes which continue to bedevil Arab fiction today," without saying specifically what was objectionable.
Overall, I think readers with greater knowledge about and interest in folklore-based writing would enjoy this book better than I was able to.
|
|
|
|
