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282 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
The Dawadar spent most of his days dozing on opium. He saw barely enough of life to fuel his dreams: a couple of hundred faces, the view from the Citadel, a handful of incidents, treasured and constantly reused in inner reflection. The world is all made of one substance; it will suffice to examine any portion of it thoroughly.
…each dream carries within its womb another dream. It is the interior image of infinity.
Somewhere within the viscera of every man sits his fate, painful like a kidney stone. It is kismet. It is a story which is writing man. Some men’s fates make small stories, others great stories, epics. The big stories eat the small stories. We are all here episodes in someone else’s story.
Every visitor finds it difficult to leave Cairo. It unfolds itself like a story that will never end.The line between dreaming and waking life dissolves in this elegant riff on One Thousand and One Nights. Set in Cairo amid institutions such as the House of Sleep and the Invisible College of Sleep Teachers, and filled with djinns, talking apes, leprous knights, and magicians of questionable repute, it is one of the most compelling novels I've read that traverses the borderlands of the dreamworld. Seemingly trapped within Cairo's maze of streets and alleys, the Englishman Balian falls into a perpetual somnabulistic state, becoming just another character in an ever-expanding kaleidoscope of tales spun by an erratic, unreliable narrator. Upon waking up that first time with blood filling his throat, was it really such a good idea for Balian to enlist the help of the sketchy alchemist Vane and his mentor the Father of Cats? Maybe not, but his options for assistance are questionable to say the least. Unfortunately for Balian there will be many more bloody awakenings and just as many journeys through Cairo's underworld. And for every journey there is a story, each one of which inches the reader closer to the finale.
Melsemuth was an automaton, a seven-foot-high brass doll powered with springs and coils. The condemned would be strapped to the doll, leg to leg, chest to chest, arm to arm. Then the doll, wound up, would begin its funny clockwork dance. The gestures and kicks would get wilder and wilder. Finally as the coils were running down, Melsemuth would garotte its dancing partner and stop.