New-era 'Arabian Nights' weaves bygone stories into mosaic of modern culture

By Traci J. Macnamara, Special to the Rocky

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Elena Seibert

The cast of characters in Rabih Alameddine's new book is extensive.

Before reading The Hakawati, prepare yourself for takeoff on a fantastic magic carpet ride. Rabih Alameddine's new novel is an Arabian Nights for the 21st century.

Bewitching readers with tales of spellbinding genies and shape-shifting demons, Alameddine gives classic tales a modern twist, borrowing from the best of his sources, which include A Thousand and One Nights, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Old Testament and the Koran, to name a few.

The Hakawati is one story, and in it, Alameddine tells the stories of all times.

The book begins as Alameddine's main character, Osama al-Kharrat, has taken a leave as an engineer in Los Angeles to rejoin his family in Beirut, the once-splendid city of his youth. The year is 2003, and Osama's father is dying. To pass the time while his family is camped out in the hospital's waiting rooms, he recalls the stories that his grandfather, the family hakawati, has helped keep alive throughout the generations.

As Alameddine tells us, the hakawati is the keeper of cultural tales, a teller of myths and fables, a "troubadour of sorts, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns."

Like A Thousand and One Nights, The Hakawati embeds stories within a story to create an intricately woven tapestry of tales. In this book's classic precursor, the virgin bride Scheherazade prolongs her life by enchanting her new husband with stories that seem to have no end. According to this tradition, a mere story is a life-giving force, and Osama al-Kharrat's stories become all the more important in light of his father's failing health.

The al-Kharrat family's gathering provides the occasion for a remembrance of these tales, and the juxtaposition of a modern story with its mythological precursors provides some strikingly relevant comparisons between the two. Alameddine's practice of switching back and forth between the old and the new creates a ripple effect: We see in this book's thematic echoes just how far entrenched into the past are our current cultural paradigms of family, love and war.

In the process of telling his family history, for instance, Osama al-Kharrat remembers his first experience of war in the Middle East. It's 1967, and Osama is a 6-year-old who takes oud lessons and hurls spitballs at his classmates.

But after listening to a scratchy war report on a transistor radio, Osama becomes more concerned with current events and asks whether his father will join the fight. His father responds: "Why would I do a thing like that? This war doesn't concern us at all, has nothing to do with us. We're a peaceful country."

Despite such verbal denial, the family has the windows of its apartment painted blue the next day so that the Israelis will not be able to see their lights at night.

Interspersed throughout the story of the al-Kharrat family's dealings with war in Beirut is the mythological story of Fatima, an adventurous maidservant who has become the lover of Afreet-Jehanam, lord of the underworld. When King Kade, magician and master of light, steals him away from the pit of hell, Fatima responds by launching a rescue mission to retrieve Afreet-Jehanam from the magician's crystal palace. She flies into the clouds with her loyal imps and a fleet of flying carpets in tow.

Fatima's story does more than simply provide entertainment value and occasional comic relief. At just the right moments, Alameddine alternates the thread of her story with that of the al-Kharrats, resulting in a narrative whose disparate parts come together with a richness that gives this book its cultural, historical and literary worth.

But be forewarned: Readers who do not approach The Hakawati with its cultural and literary context in mind might find themselves disappointed. The cast of characters seems infinite, and their relationships can be confusing at times. It may require more than the usual effort to keep track of the multiple plots that Alameddine is juggling in this book. You might expect this, however, from a book whose stories encompass all of those told since the beginning of time.

In The Hakawati's opening lines, Alameddine asks his readers to "Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story." This book covers ambitious terrain, and the author succeeds in doing what he has proposed. In the process, Alameddine proves that he's the hakawati for our times.

Traci J. Macnamara is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in national magazines, journals and books. She lives in Vail.

The Hakawati

* By Rabih Alameddine. Alfred A. Knopf, 544 pages, $25.95

* Grade: A-

The story behind the word

Alameddine is the author of two other novels and a book of short stories. On the origins of his latest book's title, he says: "Like the word hekayeh (story, fable, news), hakawati is derived from the Lebanese word haki, which means talk or conversation. This suggests that in Lebanese the mere act of talking is storytelling."