![]() The main pleasure derived from these snaking, hooked fables is in the very moment of reading them. Like the Nights, The Hakawati is told as stories within stories, and so florid and entangled are the stories that now, looking back, it's sometimes hard for me to disentangle many of them. In his acknowledgments, Alameddine mentions the many sources that inspired his retellings, among them The Iliad, Kalila wa Dimna, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Flowers from a Persian Garden, Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales, and, most prominently, A Thousand and One Nights. The Hakawati's beautiful nested stories are rooted in Arabic and Indo-Persian folktales, as well as biblical stories and Western folk traditions. ![]() ![]() I was struck initially by the book's title, the Arabic word for “storyteller.” It seems to be the first time a novel has come out from a major press with an Arabic title moreover, the title is practically buoyant on the cover. ![]() Rabih Alameddine has spun a honeycomb of fable, family history, and Lebanese lore in his newest novel, The Hakawati. ![]()
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