Plot: I can’t really summarise the plot because of how many stories run into each other and involve the same characters this makes any summary a little bit pointless. However a really short introduction to the narrative is that a traveler arrives in Cairo only to be taken in by this unknowable force which is a cross between lucid dreaming and drug fueled fantasies known as The Arabian Nightmare. Structure: Dreamlike, story within a story. What I liked: The structure the vivid language and the engaging narration. What I didn't like: Because of the nature of the stories it was sometimes hard to keep up with whether we’d met a character before and also just keeping up with which character was who. This just made it a little bit of a difficult read even if your reading it all at once as I did. Favourite Quote: ‘Do you see the city below us? Do you seeit? In the evenings dimness does it not seem to you like a child’s toy or a gaming board and the people thronging its streets like tiny dolls or even insects? Up here do not their struggles and their ideals and their passions seem ridiculous?’Main Body of the Review: First off I will say the most exciting thing about this book is the structure which is partly based on 1001 nights or Arabian nights. This means every story and chapter runs into each other. The structure is a dream within a dream, a story within an allegory within another story. This means that is hard to tell what is fantasy and reality in this novel. It starts very dreamlike and although events are odd they aren't horrible. Slowly however the characters and you as the reader begin to get trapped in a maze of overlapping narratives and the story becomes more of a nightmare. This is quite a surreal read and so at times logic and reasoning do not apply this can be quite challenging but i feel like if you just let yourself be carried away by the surrealness, if you just go with it sort of begins to take on its own form of logic. One chapter of this book is genuinely called ‘The conclusion of the continuation of the interludes conclusion’, which might give you the tone of the novel. I some ways I would liken it to ‘If on a Winters Night a Traveler’ by Italo Calvino so if you enjoyed that book I would recommend this to you. I can’t really say it was entirely an enjoyable read but it was a very rewarding one, and I also I couldn't put the book down. After I had finished this novel I not only felt like a more accomplished reader but also the writer side of me felt really inspired in terms of what a surreal and dreamlike narrative can achieve.The Rating: Because I wouldn't exactly categorise this as the most enjoyable for me I find it quite hard to rate the book but the story/writing style has really stayed with me and it is incredibly well written so I am going to give it a 4/5.
I'd been meaning to read this for a long time. When I first began to read some stranger fiction - the first time I discovered the Dedalus imprint, I think - I saw The Arabian Nightmare recommended highly. It's one of those books which has attained cult status - and pretty reasonably, too, given that it's part sex manual, part spy story, part meditation on dreams and part talking-animal tale, all wrapped in the patterned carpets of Orientalism and stuffed inside a shaggy dog. I suspect it's one of those books which, by dint of the enormously evocative descriptions and obviously well-researched background - Irwin is a scholar and Cairo is certainly in his bailiwick - dazzles readers and seems, like the rope trick, to be something more than it is. It is enjoyable. I can't deny that. The beginning of the work creates atmosphere as quickly as anything I've read. But it doesn't maintain interest as well as the narrative seems to think it does. Storytelling and the unreliability of narration - as well as the structure of the work echoing the loss of stability felt by the lead characters - is a big element. It's just unfortunate the action seems less of a concern than the setting. Library Journal suggested "the novel's intricacy is likely to put off the general reader" but I don't think the general reader is the only one put off by a narrative that doesn't know what to do with itself. I've read plenty of odd-structured fiction, so I'm OK with experimentation. But here, unlike the studied confusion of Potocki's The Manuscript Found In Saragossa - a book Irwin modelled this work on - there's not really a feeling of unification. The amount of reviews calling Irwin's text a mind-boggler or somehow otherwise transcendental are a bit off the mark. Yes, it is an unusual book. Yes, it does capture a setting, a point in time particularly well. Yes, it does the Eco/Calvino shaggy-dog thing. But other books do this better. Irwin's research is excellent, his writing isn't full of the gimlet-eyed mysticism which haunts some other psychogeographical writers - but the book is ultimately less satisfying than, say, Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars. This book aims to be a puzzle box, and it is puzzling though perhaps not in the way the author intended. An excellent addition to the text are the illustrations of 'the Scottish Canaletto', David Roberts. They're excellently evocative, and provide a real sense of location for the narrative, albeit an Orientalist take. The Arabian Nightmare is a story of searching, and a search for a story. I can't help but like it, though - the audacity of its ramshackle construction is appealing, if not completely understandable.
What do You think about The Arabian Nightmare (2002)?
so i started reading this on the subway sitting next to a man who was (somehow) simultaneously reading and humming. who does that?? so by the time i got to work i realized i hadnt absorbed anything because i was so distracted by hummy. so i started over. and it made more sense this time, but it was tainted by having to be restarted. and then life intervened and i put it down for a few days and lost the plot(s) - not a great idea. this review is a mess. bottom line - its my own damn fault i didnt like this more than i did. its very intricate and requires more sustained involvement than i could give it. so i apologize to you, book. you can stay on table...
—karen
"Every visitor will find it hard to leave Cairo. It unfolds itself like a story that will never end." In June 1486, the Englishman Balian, a pilgrim on his way to the monastery of Saint-Catherine in Sinai, arrives in Cairo hoping to obtain a transit visa from the Ma...meluke authorities and with a secret mission from the French court to spy on their decaying forces. However, on his very first night, Balian is afflicted by a strange sleep condition which he is told is the Arabian Nightmare. Desperate for a cure and hoping to escape various evil figures, he dissapears in the hallucinated dephts of the sweltering city and into the maelstrom of his own dreams. "It would not be easy for Vane and the Father of Cats to find Balian. He was somewhere among the hundreds of thousands of Cairo's poor and maimed who whispered and drifted through the city like dead leaves. They were all half alive and barely rational. But all sorts of things with no rational voice moved across Cairo with them, winds, animals, spirits, moods." This book which is built in a similar fashion to "The Thousand and One Nights", (and is indeed their starting point), is a sort of medieval freakshow that evoques the literary universes of both Lawrence Durell and Edward Said. Glorious in its grossness, it reminds one of "Salammbô". Surprisingly, it has the guts to start on a direct quote from Proust. An amazing read, the action spirals downward into the realm of dreams (Al-Alam al-mithal) on a quest for the waking world. "What is quest? A quest is to ask a question while in motion, that's all."
—Sjonni
More interesting as a formal exercise than as, you know, a book. Book reads as if Irwin -- British academic with a focus on "Oriental Studies" if memory's serving -- has decided he's gonna take the tricky, narrative maze of 1,001 Arabian Nights and update it for folks who've read Naked Lunch and maybe like pills too much. Book begins with a kind of brilliant conceit about a fatal sleeping disease and an insomniac protagonist so unreliable as a narrator that you begin to wonder if this will prove to be the most compelling read ever. Ever. Story starts to chart the boundary between the elliptical and the pointless, and ultimately seems to drop A for B in an ending that I found peculiarly rushed for a book I was so ready to put down. Kind of remember this book as being unbearable, but wondering if it would have been great if it were about 200 pages longer and Irwin had been able to let his wowsome ideas breathe a tad. Probably best read in the end if you're about feverish imagery involving leprosy and sex, fetid things. Book looks good on paper, but fights outside its weight class and loses early.
—Wes Freeman
