Word: schami
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Damascus Nights By Rafik Schami Ferrar, Straus and Giroux...
Tales, yarns, biographies, anecdotes, fables, government propaganda, gossip, myths, parables: stories stories. If Rafik Schami hoped to set the critics cooing over the thickly-woven narrative splendor of his first novel, Damascus Nights, he went the right way about writing it. He tells the story of a story-teller who has to have a series of stories told him by save him from a fairytale curse of dumbness which prevents him from telling stories. Do you see a theme forming" The essence of, say, a thousand night and a night of story-telling have been compressed into a single volume...
There's no mistaking the reference; Schami is flogging his heritage to American publishers. He capitalizes on the romantic nation of Arab story-telling, as thousands have before him. But Schami boasts an advantage that Nerval or Flaubert could never attain: he is an Arab. He understands what makes Damascenes tick, and embues his account with a wealth of genuine detail that French Orientalists could only dream of (when they weren't dreaming about those slave-girls they bought in Cairo). At the same time, he knows his surroundings well enough to misrepresent them subtly: Damascus appears slightly trated...