Descrizione
It is perhaps the most famous fairy tale in the world, a classic that has seduced readers from the East and the West for centuries. But it is also a thousand-year-old and stratified work that mixes Persian, Arabic and Indian traditions, which remained in the shadows for a long time before an eighteenth-century French Arabist brought its literary splendor to light. For Kader Abdolah, it is “that majestic book that has always been on the mantelpiece” of his father’s house and that has accompanied him throughout his life. Following a family tradition that invites every elder to rewrite an ancient text to leave as a legacy to their descendants, but addressing us Europeans, the Iranian author tells his Thousand and One Nights, a modern version that retains all the fairy-tale atmosphere and sensual charm of the original source. Night after night, to save her life, the beautiful Shehrazade bewitches the bloodthirsty sultan with a river of tales within tales that speak of caliphs and viziers, princesses and slaves, merchants, jinn, metamorphoses and magic, staging power, desire, love and the game of destiny. An enchanted labyrinth of stories to which Kader Abdolah adds brief notes to tell what is behind the scenes: the complex origins of the work and its protagonist, the changes it has undergone through the centuries and cultures, the historical figures it hides, the role of female figures in a violently patriarchal world. But it is above all the pleasure of telling that is found on every page of this book, whose protagonists are the word and the imagination with their power to save us, to stop time for more than a thousand and one nights.
