The Arabian Nightmare

Rating:
Summary: Review in The Guardian
Review: ' Robert Irwin is indeed particularly brilliant. He takes the story-within-a-story technique of the Arab storyteller a stage further, so that a tangle of dreams and imaginings becomes part of the narrative fabric. The prose is discriminating and, beauty of all beauties, the book is constantly entertaining'. Hilary Bailey in The Guardian

Rating:
Summary: Arabian Nightmare
Review: I was drawn to this book by its literary style, but ended up put off by its distanced diction and its lack of character development. Though exotic sensuality is promised, little is really there on the page, and there's almost no action. Nor could I care about the characters, because they were little more than ciphers. I gave up, bored, about halfway through.

Rating:
Summary: Curiouser and curiouser
Review: Quite probably one of the best books I have ever read and a doomed to be forgotten masterpiece of the twentieth century. The Arabian Nightmare is a dark narrative of a hallucinagenic fouteenth century Cairo. Talking apes, magicians, Caliphs and mysterious underworld figures drift in and out of the interlocking tales within tales. This is, as its title suggests, the Arabian Nights gone wrong; it is imposssible to know what is happening or even who is who at any moment. Comparable only to perhaps Gustav Meyrink or The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, this book is impossible to put down and will give you dangerous dreams for many a night. Absolutely superb.

Rating:
Summary: A haunting, dreamlike novel
Review: Robert Irwin borrows the stories-within-stories scheme, well known among Arab storytellers (think about the "arabian night" for instance....). At times this tecnique is taken to such an extent that you'll easily lose track of what's happening... but then who ever knows what's really happening in this oneiric wandering through the streets of Cairo? I tend to love everything that reeks of mystery and/or eccentricity and this novel definitely met my expectations. It's full of absurd, disturbing characters and intriguing machinations, all intertwined with tales/legends that stem from arab folklore. I couldn't put it down until it ended and... I definitely loved the ending ;-)

Rating:
Summary: A haunting, dreamlike novel
Review: Robert Irwin borrows the stories-within-stories scheme, well known among Arab storytellers (think about the "arabian night" for instance....). At times this tecnique is taken to such an extent that you'll easily lose track of what's happening... but then who ever knows what's really happening in this oneiric wandering through the streets of Cairo? I tend to love everything that reeks of mystery and/or eccentricity and this novel definitely met my expectations. It's full of absurd, disturbing characters and intriguing machinations, all intertwined with tales/legends that stem from arab folklore. I couldn't put it down until it ended and... I definitely loved the ending ;-)

Rating:
Summary: A journey into lands of nightmare. . .
Review: Set in the fifteenth century, this novel ostensibly tells the story of an English spy (or is it pilgrim?) who may possibly have contracted an unknown and unknowable illness while on sojourn in Egypt. The lines between waking and dream increasingly blur, and as with all dreams, the more that is revealed the less clear things become. A marvelous horror-fantasy, at once whimsical and terrifying, as well as a clever pastiche of "The Arabian Nights." Also, the best attempt at conveying the disjointed yet strangely patterned twists of dream logic on paper I have ever read. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Incantatory, alluring
Review: This book, in such a relatively compact space, unfolds and unfolds itself, into stories within stories within stories. The cast of characters is continually shuffled around in a landscape that is equal parts real and unreal. (Cairo itself IS a major character in the story.) The results are very entertaining, albeit very dark. The Father of Cats, in particular, is a particularly chilling villian. I read this book for a week, and each night I would read it in bed, before I fell asleep. Although I never had any nightmares from reading the book--the experience of my own drowsiness when reading the book reminded me of the central issues in the book. It teeters between the waking world and the dream world, and the book succeeds brilliantly when the two are indistinguishable.