If the tales of the first volume (see review on this site) have a fairy-tale quality, transporting us into a world populated by spirits and magical inventions, here the novellas have a realistic cast; the reading is less enthralling, but we derive from it a portrayal of Abbasid society, of the power of the caliph and his emirs, of court intrigues, and of the resigned obedience of the subjects. In the tale The Power of Love, the wretched Ghanin is severely punished on the false accusation of having seduced the caliph's favorite. Blind jealousy drives the "Commander of the Faithful" to persecute the young man and his family. When the caliph realizes his terrible mistake and asks what he can do for him, Ghanin replies that

the servant cannot in any way reproach the master for how the latter saw fit to behave toward him. (...) The servant remains the servant, and the master remains the master

; it is the young man's mother who courageously urges the caliph to reflect upon how fragile human nature is,

how often it is prone to deception and dissimulation. And think of how these wicked inclinations can be exacerbated by jealousy, to which women are all too susceptible. One must not believe that we are dealing with a sort of Arabic Decameron or Gogol's Dead Souls with a Middle Eastern flavor (see reviews on this site); in the novellas of this second volume as well, prose is interwoven with poetry, the tales interlock with one another, the beauty of men and women prevails, and one flees from reality into the implausible. Is what we recount an illusion? In the opening of the immensely long tale The Faces of Love, which depicts a fabulous, boundless world reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence or Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise (see reviews on this site), the beauty of the young prince is sketched with verses steeped in narcissistic desire:

He is the fawn of the gazelle with a hesitant gait!/He need only take a mirror in hand:/faithful and flattering, it will reflect/the absolute idea of beauty that his dream casts upon it. The finest novellas are those featuring Caliph Harun al-Rashid (who reigned between 766 and 809). It seems that this ruler was

fond of anecdotes, current news, and gossip

; so, disguised as a common citizen, he would go out to discover how ordinary people lived and to play pranks at their expense. How dreadfully dull life must have been in the palaces of Baghdad! In The Sleeper Who Does Not Sleep, the caliph, posing as a merchant, makes his way into the home of the honest Hasan; after getting him drunk, he makes him drink a potent sleeping draught; taken to the palace, Hasan spends a night as caliph, believing it to be reality: he is taken for a madman and locked in an asylum. When he comes out, he continues to live no longer knowing whether he is in a dream or in reality.

Why did you instill confusion in my mind, why did you turn my brain upside down?. And "the successor of the Prophet" candidly replies that he does it for pleasure. In the novella The Caliph and the Madman, al-Rashid wants to understand whether a person locked in an asylum is truly mad; what emerges is a series of interlocking tales, in a Pirandellian atmosphere, in which the wit of the grand vizier—an ever-present figure in The Thousand and One Nights—tests the poor lunatic; it will later turn out that, rather than wit, one should speak of deceit, for the grand vizier wished to prevent the marriage between his daughter and the alleged madman. We leave it to the reader to discover the plot of The Persian Sage. Here we shall merely say that a remarkably handsome "cookshop keeper,"

he is the stallion/of every grace

, manages to win over the splendid princess thanks to a love potion concocted by the wise sorcerer. Let us revel in these delightfully erotic verses:

Side by side, close together, with my own eyes/I saw them, I would have loved/to see them sleep together/upon my very eyelids./They were two gazelles of the desert,/and two radiant stars in the night,/two morning stars, perfect boughs,/and two incarnations of divine Beauty.

René R. Khawam, the editor of this edition of The Thousand and One Nights, concluded after extensive research that the two books in this second volume, Wandering Passions and The Taste of Days, complement the better-known ones presented in the first volume: Illustrious Ladies and Gallant Servants and Inhuman Hearts. Naturally, I am in no position to contest the editor's choices, particularly on an issue so fraught with ambiguity due to the difficulty of imposing order upon this crucial testimony to the Arabic poetry of the Caliphate of Baghdad. It is difficult to believe that we are facing a succession of nocturnal tales, both because of the length of the novellas and because of their realistic framework; poetry too loses weight compared to prose, and the narration no longer possesses the brisk pace of the tales in the first volume. One senses a certain weariness, a certain formalistic and repetitive quality, as though the political and military decline of the great empire were reflected in its song, both nostalgic and despairing. While in the tales of the first volume there is always an ending pointing toward a happy future, here every novella concludes with an invocation of Death, of

the Destroyer of Pleasures and Severer of Gatherings, (...) May God be merciful to us on the day of that appointed meeting.

Why read it? It is wordy at times, it takes effort, but it is well worth it.

The Thousand and One Nights, Volume II