cover image Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments

Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments

Andrei Codrescu. Princeton Univ., $22.95 (200p) ISBN 978-0-691-14337-8

Novelist, poet, and NPR commentator Codrescu (The Poetry Lesson) displays his usual unorthodox intellect in this interpretation of the tale of Sheherezade. He opens with a series of quotations from earlier recountings and interpretations, ending with this: "Sharyar (the sultan) is the spectator par excellence" whose violence is controlled by "Shezz the Telly." Codrescu posits Sheherezade as a "proto-feminist" who volunteered to marry the sultan to end his brutal habit of marrying virgins, deflowering them, and executing them the next morning. Codrescu takes issue with scholar Husain Haddawy's acclaimed 1990 translation of the tales because it underscores the Arabic national character of stories that, according to Codrescu, can belong to no one culture or religion. For Codrescu, stories, and the curiosity that propels them, belong to all humanity. Sex, mystery, curiosity, and imagination are linked in Codrescu's narrative, and he finds them lacking in a brief critique of today's media-driven world. Salacious, irreverent, and impious, Codrescu's modern version of the classic, accompanied by his commentary in more than 100 footnotes, may disquiet some readers, while others will enjoy his humor and insights into storytelling devices. (June)