Nights in Damascus Are Filled With Tales

Damascus Nights By Rafik Schami Ferrar, Straus and Giroux $20.00, 263 pp.

Tales, yarns, biographies, anecdotes, fables, government propaganda, gossip, myths, parables: stories stories. If Rafik Schami hoped to set the critics cooing over the thickly-woven narrative splendor of his first novel, Damascus Nights, he went the right way about writing it. He tells the story of a story-teller who has to have a series of stories told him by save him from a fairytale curse of dumbness which prevents him from telling stories. Do you see a theme forming" The essence of, say, a thousand night and a night of story-telling have been compressed into a single volume.

There's no mistaking the reference; Schami is flogging his heritage to American publishers. He capitalizes on the romantic nation of Arab story-telling, as thousands have before him. But Schami boasts an advantage that Nerval or Flaubert could never attain: he is an Arab. He understands what makes Damascenes tick, and embues his account with a wealth of genuine detail that French Orientalists could only dream of (when they weren't dreaming about those slave-girls they bought in Cairo). At the same time, he knows his surroundings well enough to misrepresent them subtly: Damascus appears slightly trated up for the Western reader, slightly more quaint and foreign than it actually is. A sly native salesmanship pervades the book, turning everyday Syrian banalities into a world of mystery and intrigue.

Not that Schami fits only into the queerball towel-head tradition. He weds Middle Eastern enigma with good old-fashioned European story-cycles. He self-consciously spurns the narrative conventions of the modern novel and reverts to the tradition of Homer, Apuleius, Bocaccio and Chaucer. We're talking tale within a tale within a tale.

But again, Schami's narrative tactic seems more like salesmanship. He uses this structure not for any purpose so much as to revel in it for its sake. Modern authors like Calvino use a similar framework to lay bare all the peculiar social and intellectual conventions of reading , to strike at the very heart of our understanding of narrative, to unravel the fabric of reality-to bring the universe of perception to its knees. Schami uses it because it's cool and exotic.

Damascus Nights reads simply as a long parable expounding the healing virtue of stories. They're grrreat. Schami implies that all the world's story, and all the men and women merely characters-I have this vague feeling I've heard that somewhere before. This forced reiteration reduces wisdom to hokeyness.

But perhaps Schami has the last laugh. He knows just what he is doing. As he says, "Lies and spices are brothers and sisters. Lies turn any bland fare into a piquant delicacy. The truth and nothing but the truth is something only a judge wants to hear." He fibs about Syria; he shamelessly serves up his heritage, re-seasoned for Western palates while still claiming authenticity, and passes his work off as a critical development in fiction. To quote the blurb on the back cover: "Slyly oblivious to the Western cartographies of narrative art and faithful only to the oral itineraries of the classic Arab story-tellers, Rafik Schami plays with the genre of the Western novel, and he explodes it from within." Well I guesses I'd better go throw out my novel collection.

Damascus Nights heaves with charming characters, gripping tales, and local color. The reader can't but enjoy the down-to-earth, homespun appearance of its simple stories. But the novel has a calculated air of Oriental gloss; you can't escape the feeling that Schami is secretly laughing at you for lapping it up. The Thousands Night and a Night appeals precisely because it reveals a different narrative culture unself-consciously; Damascus Nights has been deliberately pre-packaged for Western audiences.