If any work of fiction might be powerful enough to transcend the mountain of polemic, historical inquiry, policy analysis and reportage that stands between the Western reader and the Arab soul, it's this wonder of a book - a book not about a jihadi but a hakawati (Arabic for storyteller). “Listen,” Rabih Alameddine invites. “Allow me to be your guide. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.” “The Hakawati” uses one of the oldest forms of storytelling, the frame tale. Western readers know it from “The Canterbury Tales,” but the device precedes Chaucer by well over a thousand years, originating in Sanskrit texts known variously as the “Panchatantra,” “The Fables of Bidpai” or “Tales of Kalila and Dimna.” As Doris Lessing notes in her introduction to the most recent English translation, one version of the Sanskrit framing narrative has Alexander the Great enlisting an Indian sage to reform a cruel potentate by telling him stories. In another, an Indian king uses the stories to arouse the curiosity of his three sons, whose brains have gone soft from privilege. Whatever the original frame, the history of the whole collection is a record of the cross-fertilization of cultures. Through storytelling, the conquered and the conquering can become as close as family. In “The Hakawati,” the framing narrative concerns a young man's trip from Los Angeles to his father's deathbed in Beirut. There he and his relatives exchange jokes, tear-jerking tales, cliffhangers and legends during the weeks of their vigil. Some of their stories are contemporary — the description of an impetuous sister's wedding, a great-grandfather falling in love, troubles at the family's car dealership, the 1967 war, the demise of a favorite uncle. But their wellspring is ancient and varied: Alameddine has poached from and transformed parables from the “Panchatantra,” the Old Testament, Homer, Ovid, the Qur'an, the uncensored “Thousand and One Nights,” a collection of medieval poetry called “The Delight of Hearts,” “Flowers From a Persian Garden” and many other sources. Yet this novelist, like his characters, isn't content to leave the tales as they are. “By nature,” he writes in his acknowledgments, “a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across - each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip - is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar and served as a piping-hot tale.” The result might have been experimental folderol, but Alameddine has a genius for the emotional hinges on which novels turn. We learn this during the earliest stages of the book, as the narrator worries about his father: “His laborious inhalations gurgled. Shallow breaths. He cracked feeble jokes. He tried to move, but just getting his arm to behave was arduous.” In a more predictable novel, the next tale might have been about the ailments of a venerable king. Instead we hear of a slave, her hand cut off by a demon, who embarks on a journey through the underworld in search of her missing extremity, departing with “no plan, no weapon and no energy to speak of.” The suffering of the narrator's father has been transmogrified into a slave's retrieval of her dignity. It suggests, without actually mentioning either, the journeys of Aeneas and Odysseus to the realms of the dead. Both the old yarns and the new ones are shaped by Alameddine's strong comedic instinct. He craftily modernizes the story of the handless slave, making a potentially creaky anecdote both campy and evocative. By the final scene of her walk through hell, a series of imps have stolen everything she has, including her clothing: “She marched. As she had expected, snakes slithered everywhere except along her path. Boas, asps and rattlers. Desert snakes, swamp snakes. She barely noticed them. Naked, helpless, exhausted and bereft, she staggered forward. Dullness, her sole possession, clung to her.” The lassitude of the narrator's father on his deathbed has found an unlikely but convincing echo. This strategy of emotional resonance builds as the novel unfolds. Today poetry remains the favored high literary form in Arabic. Yet “A Thousand and One Nights,” one of the world's early examples of prose fiction, is thoroughly Arabic. It wasn't until the turn of the last century that magic and the supernatural began their serious decline in Arabic fiction. With the Egyptian Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz, the modern novel, steadfastly realistic, took hold in the 1950s. Experimental modernist fiction arrived later, paradoxically heightening readers' awareness of its deeper literary roots. Thus the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury's masterpiece, “Gate of the Sun,” drew on the tradition of “A Thousand and One Nights,” using a doctor's stories to a dying soldier as its framing narrative. The stories the doctor told, however, centered on specific recent historical events: the creation of Israel and of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Alameddine's novel also draws on ancient tradition to make an old form authentically new. At times, the stunning creative drive in “The Hakawati,” with its wealth of stories and characters, can be almost overwhelming. One of its ruses teased me throughout: was the narrator's first name, Osama, an intentional reference to Osama Bin Laden? After all, his last name, al-Kharrat, means “the fibster” in Arabic. (This last name was bestowed on the narrator's grandfather, who performed as a hakawati in cafes.) In this book, where searing political upheavals like the Lebanese civil war figure but don't dominate, and in an era when almost all we seem to see of the Middle East is terrorism, it's bracing to come upon a work - and a world - that expands our narrow vision, transforming it to one of multiplicity, enchanting it with hope. - NYT __
