What I'm Reading

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. Telling a story to save one's life -- something that not only Scheherazade does but also a good number of the characters in the stories she tells -- is such a strange, wonderful bargain. I was shocked to discover, reading these stories as an adult, how pervasive sexual transgression, particularly women's betrayal of men, is in this book. I read 1001 Nights as a child, in the Romanian translation, and all I remembered from that childhood reading was shrewd viziers, women peering through heavily curtained windows, glittering mountains of jewels, and gardens suffused with the perfume of jasmine. I often forget who narrates the story I'm reading at any one point because so many of them are told within other stories which are themselves nestled into other stories, like Russian dolls. This frustrates me no end but also forces me to rethink the concept of ownership of a story -- is there really one mind to whom it belongs?

RUNAWAY, Stories. This is Alice Munro's latest collection. It's simply wonderful. Munro is so patient with her stories; she lets them linger on the page, lets them build paragraph by paragraph into mansions of many apartments through which you can wander tirelessly and with undiminished joy. You get the feeling that you're not really reading but watching lives unfold before your eyes.

RASHOMON, and Other Stories, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. I am mesmerized by this Japanese writer's prose: it's so measured, quiet, and clear as water. The stories take place in medieval Japan and have a deceptive simplicity and straightforwardness. There are touches of the bizarre, like the old woman who makes wigs from hairs she plucks from corpses' heads. But underlying every story is a deep and relentless concern with the intricacies of human life -- what gives it meaning (sometimes simply the desire to stuff oneself with yam gruel), how limited the eye and the mind are in seeing the truth.