The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 2 (Penguin Classics) Paperback – Illustrated, May 25, 2010

Classic I love since my childhood

I feel that I am having one of the great reading experiences of my life with this new translation of THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. Volume I was mind-blowing with its kaleidoscopic variety and Volume II is even more so. There is more variation in both story structure and subject matter. One of the more interestingly structured stories tells of a king's concubine who tries to seduce the king's son. When he rebuffs her, she goes to his father and accuses him of trying to seduce her and demands that he be beheaded. The king is set to do it, but then a vizier comes forth and tells a story about the wiles of women and why the king should not believe her. The king decides against executing his son. Then the next day the disappointed concubine returns begging the king to reconsider, and tells a story to illustrate the wiles of men which convinces the king to kill his son. Then a second vizier steps forward and tells a story about the wiles of women and the king changes his mind again. And so it goes through seven viziers until the king is saved at the last minute from making a terrible mistake. Many of the stories in this volume deal with con artists and tricksters. Some of them made me really uncomfortable when it looked as though injustice would prevail. Not all the stories have happy endings. (Dalila the Trickster, who is the vilest con artist in the book, just made me angry!) This volume is even sexier than the first volume and in places gets fairly graphic, with jokes about penis size and egg white used as a substitute for another substance. As in volume I, the women tend to be lusty and the men moon over unattainable beauties. One lusty woman has a secret love affair with a bear! Both lesbianism and male homosexuality are depicted. One homosexual story is a comic tale of a young man eluding the amorous advances of an older man and another is the only positive depiction of homosexuality in the book. In that story a young man discovers that his brother is having an affair with a neighbor when he finds them asleep together, but seeing that his brother is happy, he decides to keep mum about it. One of the stories is basically an adolescent gross-out joke featuring pus and vomit. Several stories go beyond fantasy into the surreal, such as the one that features an epic battle between apes and giant ants. The same saga features a talking female snake that is rather frightening, but ends up being a very noble character. This volume contains the saga of Sinbad (two different versions), which I did not find nearly as interesting as some of the other stories. However, there is one section (between about a third and halfway through the book) that I found excruciating. It's about a young woman who is engaged in a battle of wits with multiple scholars on such subjects as anatomy and Islamic religion. Maybe that was fascinating stuff for a medieval Muslim, but for this 21st Century non-Muslim, it was a big bore. But once I got past the halfway point in the book, I zoomed through the rest of it. I recommend just scanning this section, even though I did not. This is a great work of literature in which I found fragments that reminded me of Shakespeare, The Bible, Grimm, Homer, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I wish I had read it a long time ago and I look forward to the final volume. Five stars despite the slow section.

This is volume two of an excellent translation by Malcolm Lyons of the full thousand-and-one-night Arabic manuscript, compiled in Egypt and known in the West as the Macnaghten edition or Calcutta II. All three volumes have introductory essays by Robert Irwin, author of _The Arabian Nights - A Companion_ (also a very interesting and accessible must-have for readers of the _Arabian Nights_). Irwin's volume two essay provides an entertaining and informative overview of the literary history of the _Arabian Nights_, and its succinct ten pages would be useful, for instance, in a high school or college course on this classic frame story. Volume two includes nights 295 to 719. Fans of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1974 film version, "Il fiore delle mille e una notte," will find in volume two a text version of his movie's frame story in the form of "'Ali Shar and Zumurrud" (Pasolini does not use the story of Shahrazad as his frame, and changes the name and character of 'Ali to an unsophisticated boy, Nureddin, whom Zumurrud must "educate.") The first two nested tales of the movie, read to Nureddin by Zumurrud, also can be found in written form in volume two as "Harun al-Rashid and the Lady Zubaida in the pool," and "Abu Nuwas and the three boys." (Scholars of Swahili literature will find several Abu Nuwas stories in volume two, as well the written version of Steere's 1869 "Hekaya ya Mohammadi Mtepetevu" from _Swahili Tales As Told By Natives of Zanzibar_. In volume two, it is "Abu Muhammad the sluggard," from nights 299 to 305.) The stories of "The slave girl Tawaddud," "Sindbad the sailor" (including an alternate ending), "The City of Brass," and "Dalila the wily" are also in volume two. The translation of the alternative version of Sindbad's seventh voyage, "Sindbad and the elephant graveyard," is provided by Ursula Lyons, from the French text by Antoine Galland. Her fine translations of Galland's "orphan stories" (i.e., ones not included in the Egyptian manuscript, but offered in his _Les Mille et une nuits_)--"The story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves" and "The story of Aladdin, or The Magic Lamp"--can be found in volumes one and three respectively.

If I remember correctly this book contains a reference to child pornography (it's a very small section, which can be reviewed by parents ahead of time). But that seems unfortunate, since the usual usefulness for this kind of book is raising imaginative educated young children.Otherwise, it is creative and enchanting, and does not have as many references to Sinbad as the third volume.The descriptions of cities, jewels, and love affairs seem very eloquent and "high form".I dog-eared a page that describes the search across seven seas of Solomon for a single divine plant that would make the wearer run dry-shod over the water. The passage about feeding the queen snake bowls of wine and water to learn the secrets of how to talk to the herbs to acquire the divine plant seemed especially archetypal (#487 approximately).I once overheard someone's theory on the books, that the second book reveals evil, and the first book reveals good, while the third book is confusion or neutrality. This is partly a joke about Sinbad, but perhaps that is the case.Anyway, I'm not a pedophile, so I found the one (actually extended) case to be morally reprehensive. But the rest of the book was good for adults and intelligent children.

My brother is married to a woman from Pakistan so I thought it may be a funny gift. They both seemed to enjoy it, and the books looked very nice. I read an abridged version a long time ago. From what i recall, it was a very good story, there are some adult themes though; so maybe not a present for young kids.