Books – Page 30 – The Book-Butterfly

Arabian Nights Sir Richard Burton Translation

February 11, 2021

For this reading venture, I chose the controversial translation by Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890). I had to wade through hundreds of pages of old-fashioned language, terminology that are deemed politically incorrect nowadays, some unusual words that Burton coined himself, and content that was considered pornography in Burton’s time. (On a side note, Burton also translated the Kama Sutra and its Tunisian counterpart, The Perfumed Garden. Given those inclinations, this was not one of the watered-down versions we used to find lying around our grandparents’ living rooms.)

This edition has fine and tastefully-colored illustrations that are oases from the antiquated writing style that 21st Century eyes are no longer accustomed to. A collection of Eastern folk tales and stories compiled during the Islamic Golden Age, I enjoyed coming across real historical figures from that era that were woven alongside the fictional characters.

Haroun al-Rashid, the fifth Abbasid Caliph who ruled from 786-809 appears in many of the stories along with his Persian vizier Jafar who, by the way, was not a villain. The Islamic Empire was said to be at its most powerful under this caliph’s reign. They traded and maintained diplomatic ties with China, and because stories were also traded along the Silk Roads, it may not be too surprising that in the Arabian Nights, Aladdin is actually Chinese.

On the year Al-Rashid became caliph, his son Al-Mamun was born, and it would be Al-Mamun’s obsession for knowledge and a large-scale commissioning of translations of ancient texts from Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and India that would result into the Translation Movement — and perhaps, in addition, this compilation.

As one who finds this region of the world and that period of history intriguing, I still find this worthy of any book-lover’s shelf space. However, I now understand why later writers feel compelled to refashion the stories into something more relatable, or make adaptations for younger audiences without the sexual imagery, or modify the individual stories with a more discernible moral aim.

But whether we like it or not, the Arabian Nights in its entirety has revolutionized and influenced storytelling for centuries. After having read it myself, I realized that there is an aspect that is not emphasized enough: Hers was an unselfish act. Scheherazade volunteered herself at the risk of death to prove King Sharyar’s stereotypes wrong. By so doing, she saved not only her life, but other women’s lives as well — and through an unlikely medium!

After all, isn’t there inside each of us a Scheherazade, a being who depends on the magic of stories to survive?

Orhan Pamuk: A Strangeness in My Mind

February 5, 2021

The first page of this book quotes a passage from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude:
“I had melancholy thoughts…
A strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.”

For someone who has felt like an anachronism all her life, I felt like I owned these lines. It was as if I was meant to read the book just for this, and having come across it right at the start, the rest of the book was an additional literary present.

Ever since I read My Name is Red, I have been looking for the Orhan Pamuk I encountered there in each of his books. (I even looked for the actual Pamuk in Istanbul, persuading the whole family to visit his Museum of Innocence on the European side of the city in the hope of bumping into him.) I never seemed to find that Pamuk again.

But there is something in common with this book and My Name is Red. It is the way he allows different characters to gain control over the narration, thereby lending the reader a fuller grasp.

There are things Pamuk writes that make me uncomfortable, but these simultaneously compel me to admire a straightforwardness about life that only the most courageous writers can execute.

It is only through this book that I have seen for myself what all his works have in common — aside from providing details that escape the average consciousness, perhaps a result of having gone to architecture school — every book is a love story, no matter the plot or the characters: A love story between a writer and a place; between a writer and Istanbul, or Kars; between a writer and Turkey; a love story about the effects of the bittersweet passing of time on a place; about someone who recognizes a nation profoundly inside out, from its complicated politics to its inner conflicts and issues, its customs and traditions, from its spectacular buildings to its impoverished slums, from its most magnificent cities to its humble villages, from its splendid past to what it is now; a love story with a viewpoint only a lasting lover can deliver who, after having seen its glories and deepest flaws and undesirable secrets, remains and continues to love.

Stephen Kinzer: All the Shah’s Men

“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”

This quote by Harry Truman launches the book into previously confidential details about the 1953 Iranian coup d’état that had me gasping in shock from beginning to end!

It reads like espionage fiction but it is disquieting for the fact that it is nonfiction. It is by far the most comprehensive book I have read on Iran’s modern history. My notes and thoughts will remain private because I wish for my social media accounts to remain zones of peace haha, but I have to say that reading this reinforced my thoughts on Iran’s significance. It made me realize that many major circumstances around the world are ripples of a pivotal event that occurred in Iran more than half a century ago and that this nation continues to be a crucial piece on the chessboard of world history.

Jan Morris: Venice

Ordered by my best friend as a gift in preparation for a trip to La Serenissima in 2020, it finally arrived in 2021, two weeks shy of Venice’s 1600th founding anniversary! It is disappointing that the trip got postponed and that the book took over a year to get delivered because of the pandemic, but part of me is glad that I did not return to Venice without having read this! The details in this book are so rich and they would enrich any traveler.

Jan Morris writes beautifully, intimately, but most of all, truthfully; sometimes even bluntly. She takes us not merely along the lesser known nooks of Venice but also through the unvisited alleys of her tumultuous and mysterious history. “Nothing in the story of Venice is ordinary!”

I especially find it fascinating that even though my readings of late have been focused on the East, Venice is usually part of the narrative. After all, “In Venice, as any gilded cockatrice will tell you, the East begins.” A major part of the Silk Route, Morris also notes that it is, in fact, the only Christian city marked in Ibn Khaldun’s map. It will not come as a surprise that my favorite chapter is the seventeenth — Arabesque, because “the allusions of Venice are arabesque.”

Reading this already felt like a return and the book made it possible for me to be there — “through literary proxy,” as Gaston Bachelard would say. It should also teach the reader about how and how not to travel: “Alas, the truth is that most visitors to Venice, in any case, move among her wonders mindlessly, pumped briskly through the machine and spewed out along the causeway as soon as they are properly processed.” Morris writes, too, of how the city’s “ingrained sadness is swamped with an effulgence of money-making.”

But despite its faults and tourism’s faults… it is still Venezia, which, according to Morris, is “an amphibious society peculiar to herself”; “half land, half sea… somewhere between a freak and a fairytale”; “a sexy city”; “a melancholy city at heart”; “a hall of curiosities.”

“A synonym for music,” echoes Nietzche.

Alain de Botton: The Art of Travel

“Ruskin was distressed by how seldom people noticed details. He deplored the blindness and haste of modern tourists, especially those who prided themselves on covering Europe in a week… ‘No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does… a man… no harm to go slow; for his glory is not all in going, but in being.’”

The really precious things are thought and sight! For his glory is not all in going, but in being! How beautiful is that?!

De Botton presents the chapters in an interesting way. For each chapter there are featured places and featured guides. In Chapter 8, some of the places are Madrid, Amsterdam, Barbados, and the guide is John Ruskin. In Chapter 7, the place is Provence, and the guide is Vincent Van Gogh. The places are de Botton’s destinations and the guides are the writers or artists who influenced his consciousness as he traveled.

“Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with,” he writes. And in another line, “A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity.” And how do we develop this necessary receptivity? The right company! Literature! Art! Art, he writes, are “immensely subtle instruments” that guide us to what we should pay attention to.

The Architecture of Happiness once accompanied me on a trip to Cambodia and deepened my experience with the country’s elaborate 12th Century structures, and yet The Art of Travel ironically kept getting shelved for some reason. But the pandemic that has forced me to stay put finally reunited me with this, and it is certain to augment future travels.

There are passages where I cannot relate with how de Botton feels about certain things, but I relish reading him for his enduring leitmotif — endeavoring against superficial experiences and a shallow existence. This book reminds me of something I wrote after my first solo international trip: “That is the thing about Utopia. It is not a place. If you go to Bali, do not expect to find Utopia, Faith, Peace, or Love. If you go to Bali, travel with these things within yourself and it is certain that you will find Beauty. So much Beauty.”

On this, de Botton and I surely agree that our experiences of a destination will depend so much on what we carry within us.

Freya Stark: Beyond Euphrates

“The genuinely wild is not interested in ‘seeing the world’; it is exclusively interested in being.”

Freya Stark excellently reiterates Ruskin’s view as quoted by De Botton in The Art of Travel. This is the attitude towards traveling that I truly resonate with, and for this to be repeated in two books that I happened to read successively accentuates its significance!

“With Freya Stark one doesn’t know where the traveller stops and the writer begins,” observes The Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers. And yet in Beyond Euphrates, Stark constantly mentions the inadequacy of words in describing what she has seen and experienced in her travels: “No medium has yet been devised for the translation of life into language…” But other passages also show that she knew the power of words: “I often think how heavy a responsibility we should feel, how careful we should be, if we realized how great an influence casual words may have… If one’s words have been ever a help and never a hindrance, that surely is a useful life and no other justification needed for it.”

Reading while traveling, as I also usually do, she often weaves her contemplations on her literary companions — the Arabian Nights, having “the same charm as one finds in some travel books” and “far more like real life than many stories”; the Odyssey, a “triumph of beautiful words!”

We seem to prepare for a trip the same way, too: “The foundation of such travel is careful planning; I read all I could, plotted out days and distances.” But these are not the only things we have in common. We are drawn to the same countries! “I am going to Persia in a few weeks. One’s dreams come true.” A few chapters later, “It is wonderful to be writing from Persia… it is just Persia, some high land in the centre of the world, getting near the tableland where all history began.”

_ _ _

I was introduced to the writings of Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark at the same time in 2017 when I received The Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers as a birthday present, and which travelled with me to Nepal. Since then I have been looking for both their books: I have scored two for Gertrude Bell, zero for Freya Stark.

To my delight, Beyond Euphrates came in the mail on World Book Day! My literary tastes are not easily influenced by contemporary trends but I have friends who know me well enough to know exactly what books I would enjoy! I am grateful to have such friends that are even rarer than the books!

Alain de Botton: How Proust Can Change Your Life

“It is unfortunately easier to lose a lover than complete In Search of Lost Time.” How funny but true!

Devoting the year 2009 to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was one of my most rewarding undertakings as a reader. It is, indeed, easier to lose a lover, but basking in Proust is what I imagine having synesthesia would be like. The first volume alone led to an artistic rebirth; but by the end of all seven volumes I realized that it had instilled something so delicately through its entirety — empathy.

De Botton does not mention empathy but touches on how “experiences of fictional characters afford us a hugely expanded picture of human behavior” and nods toward artists “by whom our eyes are opened.” This is De Botton’s dissection of Proust, the colossal work, and its effects on the reader. For those who have not read Proust, it can serve as an introduction; and for those who have read Proust, a confirmation of the common reader’s exact thoughts, albeit expressed meticulously in a superior and delightful way.

There are two main things that stood out out for me:

The ending. It sings about the strength of the written word right from the beginning; and this makes the closing of the book unanticipated because it transitions into a gentle admonition for readers: “It is our own thoughts we should be developing even if it is another writer’s thoughts which help us do so.” It warns against artistic idolatry and adds this Proustian reminder: “Reading is on the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.”

The view on escapism. Perhaps it is mainly the term that bothers me that I have always been uneasy with the idea of literature or any art form as a means of escapism. So when de Botton points out that escapism was not Proust’s way of handling the novel, it spoke to me and I felt understood without having to explain myself. He does not say escapism is a bad thing, but elucidates how Proust’s opinion is more attuned to art’s potential to affect our lives rather than distract us from it.

Although it is easier said than done, I think this is also a beautiful and subtle nudge for us to try our utmost to live lives we do not feel the need to escape from.

Elif Batuman: The Possessed

“One can have a very lofty idea of literature, and at the same time have a good-natured laugh at it,” Proust said in reply to a friend’s question on how seriously books should be taken.

This is exactly what Elif Batuman does in this essay collection that doubles as a memoir. The title is lengthy and self-explanatory, and based on her book titles, one can tell how influenced she is by Russian literature: The Idiot , which I read in March, and The Possessed. It is entertaining how she manages to write such serious topics with a candid humor.

Although written seven years earlier than The Idiot I seem to have enjoyed this more as it does away with much of the the main character’s adolescent romantic concerns present in the former. Perhaps it was the three sections of her summer in Samarkand that made this more appealing to me, where she learns that the Old Uzbek language has a hundred different words for crying! Or maybe it was that passing line that I really loved, “Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more?”

Despite not being able to say that this will be a favorite, it’s funny how it contains passages that I know will stay with me forever.

Colin Thubron: The Shadow of the Silk Road

Frankopan’s The Silk Roads was the first book I finished reading this year. By the time a dozen friends sent me messages that Joanna Lumley’s Silk Road Adventure on Netflix reminded them of me, the Silk Route had already taken over my neural pathways. Haha! When I was finally able to watch it, I noticed that at the end of the show, Joanna Lumley thanks Peter Frankopan and Colin Thubron. I did not know who the latter was. She led me to this book.

While Frankopan gives the reader a sweeping aerial view, Thubron walks down the roads and creates a more intimate experience. The two would be beautiful to read in succession — Frankopan for the historical details, Thubron for making history felt through intimacy. Aside from his own poetic voice, his writing becomes the voice of places and people who would have otherwise been destined to remain absent or silent in our consciousness.

“Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here… and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world… A hundred reasons clamor for your going. You go to touch on human identities, to people an empty map. You have a notion that this is the world’s heart.

Yet to follow the Silk Road is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia, but it has officially vanished, leaving behind the pattern of restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples. The road forks and wanders wherever you are. It is not a single way, but many: a web of choices.”

I did not want this book to end, and yet, even the best books do, but only to give us a deeper yearning to continue the journey beyond the pages.

Austen Henry Layard: Nineveh and its Remains

The Library of Alexandria was not the first systematically organized library in the world. There was another one that was much older: The great library of Nineveh built circa 668 BCE by Assyrian King Ashurbanipal. Although it shared Alexandria’s fate through destruction by fire, it had another advantage — its clay tablets. Alexandria’s papyrus were reduced to ashes, but Nineveh’s cuneiform clay tablets that exceeded twenty thousand in number were merely baked afresh. Not only did this library preserve the Epic of Gilgamesh for future generations, the Nineveh excavation has become a prime source of information about the Assyrians and the Babylonians whose knowledge and culture they inherited.

We all know Nineveh — this wonder of the ancient world, for a time the largest city in the world — from the Old Testament account of Jonah, but for thousands of years, it could have remained a fictional city for unbelievers until its unearthing. “Without the evidence that these monuments afford, we might almost have doubted that the great city ever existed,” writes Austen Henry Layard.

“Existing ruins show that Nineveh had acquired its greatest extent in the time of the Assyrian kings mentioned in the Old Testament. It was then that Jonah visited it, and that reports of its size and magnificence were carried to the West, and gave rise to those traditions from which the Greeks mainly derived the information they have handed down to us concerning the city.” On a footnote, Layard adds, “With regard to the connection between the ornaments mentioned in the text and those of Greek architecture, it is now impossible to doubt that all that is Ionic in the arts of Greece is derived from the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates.”

Austen Henry Layard, a name no longer too familiar to our generation, was once a household name in Europe when he discovered Nineveh in the 1840s. Quoting from the introduction, his journals “took Europe by storm and became one of those books that everyone had to read.” It has never gone out of print and is still considered to be among the greatest archaeological books of all time.

Layard being an art historian, a draughtsman, a cuneiformist, and a diplomat, among other things, this book is also so many things at once! The journals have occasional sketches of details from the excavations, he ponders on art, history, religion, civilizations, and takes the reader on his expeditions while painting a vibrant portrait of the time, places, the tribes and people that he encounters on his journeys, and writes vividly of life-threatening experiences. But the best parts are those moments of discovery that lead to spine-tingling wonder! He can be quite poetic, too: “On all sides, as far as the eye could reach, rose the grass-covered heaps marking the site of ancient habitations. The great tide of civilisation had long since ebbed, leaving these scattered wrecks on the solitary shore. Are those waters to flow again, bearing back the seeds of knowledge and of wealth that they have wafted to the West? We wanderers were seeking what they had left behind, as children gather up the coloured shells on the deserted sands.”

Reading this book recalls and intensifies the question that Jason Elliot posed in his book on Iran: “What will future archaeologists think of us when they find what we’ve left for them?”