Almost exactly a year ago,
British travel writer Tahir Shah released The
Caliph's House: A Year In Casablanca, a
book about his experiences with moving his family to Morocco, to a decrepit but
expansive estate that came with its own problematic servants. He continues the
tale with In Arabian Nights: A Caravan Of Moroccan Dreams, a rhapsodic series of anecdotes consciously modeled on One
Thousand And One Arabian Nights, in that
it presents stories nested inside other stories, raising "What happened then?"
questions and then putting off answering them as it descends into a series of
other nested stories. Sometimes the tactic is effective—Shah opens the
book with a story about being held in a Pakistani torture facility and
questioned as a suspected terrorist because of his film-related travels to
Afghanistan, and he doesn't reveal how that story ended until midway through
the book. At other times, just as in Arabian Nights itself, all the layered stories get in each other's way
and become numbing.
But for Shah, the
individual stories aren't always the point; he has larger goals, relating to
storytelling as a whole, and how people, particularly in the West, have lost
the importance of oral traditions in a world ruled by passive entertainments
and an emphasis on novelty. Early on, Shah runs across the concept that each
person has a story in their heart, which they need to find; going on a quest
for his own, he hears Arabian Nights-like fables from many of the people he meets,
including his own kids. At the same time, he reminisces about his father, who
felt storytelling was a key to life, and he talks about the many reasons
stories are important.
Sometimes, the constant
harping on stories becomes oppressive and heavy-handed; the book feels more
monomaniacal than fabulistic, in spite of Shah's emphasis on Morocco as a
magical place where people believe in jinni and carry stories in their hearts.
But his many colorful anecdotes—some explicitly fairy tales (or, more
often, jinni tales), some couched as biography, though they're so outlandish
that they read as fairy tales—are full of seductive exotica, and his philosophical
ramblings on stories and why we tell them maintain a pleasantly mythical tang.
He isn't always as incisive as he'd like to be about the storytelling roots of
society, but he sure can weave a yarn.