Book Review
Arabian Nights: WW Norton Critical Edition
3/5 stars
"Corny, overwrought prose at the front; Expatiative commentary at the back" 
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Fiction books are less than 5% of all of my reading, but this is a book that has been in print in one form or another for over a millennium. Naturally, I had to figure out what all the fuss was about. 

It's not exactly much ado about nothing, but it is much ado about very little--and the actual commentary/criticism on the fiction is 2/3 as long as the book itself. (The book starts with a preface of about 14 pages, and then the story is 350 pages. The commentary goes on from 354 to 521.)

The commentary is just entirely(!) too(!) wordy(!) to make it through. And, other than people who are literary majors of some type, who really cares about the series of steps involved in the creation of this book that is not a book?
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One thing I come up with is that Middle Easterners / Arabs really DO NOT like black people.

EVERY TIME they show up in this book, they are portrayed in a negative way. (And this is from the first page. To define a woman as debauched because her lover was black.)

They're always slaves, or linked to some type of sexual immorality.

-(p.63) "The king lowered his voice, stammered, and, simulating the accent of black people, said..."

-(p.7) "But then the 10 black slaves mounted the 10 girls, while the lady called "Massoud Massoud!" And a black slave jumped from the tree to the ground, rushed her, and, raising her legs, went between her thighs and made love to her."

In other cases (p.139), being black is part of a curse or a punishment. (It wasn't bad enough for the people who were cursed to be turned into a couple of bitches. They had to be turned into *black* bitches.) "Here they are, these two black bitches...... If you disobey my command, I will turn you into a bitch like them. I tried to give them every night 300 blows with the rod, as a punishment for what they did."
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There are questions about where exactly this book was written, and I would have to say that it didn't start out in the Arab world.

There's alcohol and illicit screwing on every other page of this book. Not what I expect from Arab Muslims. (But then, we have to remember that alcohol was not always illegal and the Wahhabis did not always run the Arabian peninsula.)

What's also missing is that: when Arabs take some place or capture something, they are known to take the women and children of either sex for sexual purposes. That is not found here and it may have been bowdlerized for Western sensitivities.

Or maybe it wasn't written by Arabs. 
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A lot of stuff here just doesn't make good sense. (And that is some of the way that you know this book was reinterpreted at least once.)

"The Christian Broker's Tale" goes into China and reinterprets it in terms of The Middle East. Dhimmis and all.

These things have *never* been part of the Chinese conceptual space.

Quite a bit of quotation of Solomon and Ecclesiastes, but: how would Arabs or Persians or Indians (all of whom are thought to have made some contribution to this) have known these things?
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Of the book:

-It was not originally written in Arabic.

-Nobody knows what first language it was written in (first it was thought to be Arabic, then Farsi), and some people have even speculated Sanskrit--it is set in India.

-It was edited over and over and over again without actually ever having been authored, and "it grew to its present form through a process closer to sedimentation than creation."

-There are not 1001 stories, contrary to popular belief. More like about 271.

-The stories don't finish at night, and they may go on for several nights and the literary technique is called "enjambment."

Of the writing: I have to imagine that maybe it loses something in translation, but I have to say that the prose is so...... corny and... overwrought.

--It seems like every other person has "lips like rubies"  or a "face like the moon" or " teeth like pearls." These children of kings are just so beautiful and smart you'd almost think that they didn't even have to ever tend to toilet functions.
--Their descriptions of the men are homoerotic. ("Beautiful as the full moon, with a slender figure and a sweet smile"?)

-The process of this book writing itself took place over more than 1,000 years, with the oldest surviving fragments being 850 CE

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Notes:

1. The movie "Weekend at Bernie's" is actually a retelling of "The Hunchbacks Tale."

2. "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves" and "Aladdin" seem to be missing from this edition. (I could guess what they would sound like if they follow a similar literary style.) 

3. "Sinbad the Sailor" does not follow the technique of enjambment. 

Verdict: The stories are just okay, but I don't recommend this version because the commentary is too much. I'd be willing to invest about 50 pages in the reading some discussion about the formation of this story. NOT 2000. 

Recommended at the price of about $3.

Quotes:

(p.124) Better for me to meet and see you not, for if the eye sees nought, the heart grieves not.

Vocabulary:

ragout
cabochon 
dappled