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Kirkus Book Reviews - Fiction
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1994-11-22
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Kirkus Book Reviews - Fiction
BOOK REPORT AS OF NOVEMBER 21, 1994
CAPSULE REVIEWS OF NEW BOOKS OF UNCOMMON MERIT OR POPULAR APPEAL
COMPILED BY KIRKUS REVIEWS, NEW YORK, NY
FICTION -
1. In A Private View, a retiree is Anita Brookner's latest
emotionally maimed hero. Release January 9.
2. A doctor who heals both the mind and body is Robertson
Davies' Cunning Man. Release February ?
3. Greg Iles' Black Cross refers to an Allied version of Nazi
nerve gas. Release January 9.
4. Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days is a modern reworking
of "The Thousand and One Nights. Release January 7.
Davies, Robertson
THE CUNNING MAN
Viking (480 pp.) $23.95
ISBN:0-670-85911-7
Davies (Murther and Walking Spirits, 1991, etc.) deftly
combines metaphysics, magic, and modern medicine to tell a
contemporary story with ancient roots as he introduces healer and
``cunning man'' Jonathan Hullah.
A ``cunning man,'' according to Robert Burton, the noted
Arabist, ``will help almost all infirmities of body and mind.''
Hullah, as a doctor who deals with that ``realm where mind and
body mingle,'' is Davies's point man for the book's major theme:
the links between the mind and disease, the recognition that
``disease is the signal that comes late in the day, that a life
has become hard to bear.'' Hullah, recently retired, prompted by
a probing question from a young woman journalist who is writing a
series of articles on old Toronto, narrates the story of his life
as a modern ``cunning man.'' Set in that urbane part of Toronto
where art, academe, and old money comfortably mingle, the novel
also explores familiar Davies themes of friendship, faith, and
art. The journalist wants to know the truth about Father Hobbes,
the rector of St. Aidan's who died while celebrating Communion.
The old man was rumored to be responsible for miraculous cures.
Hullah, who was present at Hobbes's death but neglected to
conduct an autopsy, recalls his own boyhood in the deep Canadian
woods, where he was saved from death by a local shaman; his years
at prep school, where he met the two great friends of his life,
Brocky Gilmartin and Charlie Iredale; his decision to become a
doctor; and the war experiences that led him to practice a unique
form of healing. Hullah is a clever man, with many diverting
friends, but it is his old friend Charlie, now a devout priest,
whose confession most surprises him and best illustrates the
ability of both Davies and his characters to conceal cunningly
what lurks beneath the surface.
Ideas, aphorisms, and wit are as evident as Davies's more
teleological concerns, which all makes for a splendid
intellectual romp as well as an absorbingly literate novel.
Davies at his best. (Author tour)
Mahfouz, Naguib
ARABIAN NIGHTS AND DAYS
Doubleday (304 pp.)
ISBN:0-385-46888-1
An austerely modern reworking of The Thousand and One
Nights- -the most magical work yet set into English by Egyptian
Nobel laureate Mahfouz (The Harafish, 1994, etc.).
Although these intertwined fables are, like the volume that
inspired them, set in the past, they deal with all-too-modern
consequences of fairy-tale adventures. In ``Nur Al-Din and
Dunyazad,'' peerless storyteller Shahrzad's sister dreams of the
perfume seller and wakens to find herself pregnant by him, with
all the contemporary burdens of unwanted pregnancy. In ``Sanaan
al- Gamali,'' a merchant, purchasing his life from a genie he has
crossed, is ordered to kill the corrupt governor; but when Sanaan
goes to see him, the governor, every inch the modern wheeler-
dealer, asks if he can marry Sanaan's daughter, offers his own
daughter as a bride for Sanaan's son, and announces his plan to
sign an enormous contract with one of Sanaan's relatives. In
``The Cap of Invisibility,'' a righteous man accepts a magical
gift on the condition that he be allowed to do ``anything except
what [his] conscience dictates''; he then faces moral dilemmas
the original Arabian Nights never dreamed of. This is a world of
endless transformations: A buried girl is brought back to life;
after being executed, a governor is reincarnated as a porter and
finds himself wooing his own wife; a sultan passes into an
otherworldly domain of love and bliss in which he can't remain.
The only certainties are the cruel whims of the genies (``The
best would be if she were to be killed, and her father were to
commit suicide,'' muses one of them) and the ritual executions of
corrupt governors, private secretaries, chiefs of police.
The obvious comparison in English is John Barth's
Chimera--but Mahfouz's greater faith in old-fashioned narrative
allows him to weave modernist psychology and legendary rhetoric,
making his Arabian Nights both disturbing and spellbinding.
* KIRKUS REVIEWS ARE UPDATED WEEKLY *
Transmitted: 94-11-21 14:28:55 EST