Almost exactly a year ago,
British travel writer Tahir Shah released The
Caliph's House: A Year In Casablanca, a
book about his experiences with moving his family to Morocco, to a decrepit but
expansive estate that came with its own problematic servants. He continues the
tale with In Arabian Nights: A Caravan Of Moroccan Dreams, a rhapsodic series of anecdotes consciously modeled on One
Thousand And One Arabian Nights, in that
it presents stories nested inside other stories, raising "What happened then?"
questions and then putting off answering them as it descends into a series of
other nested stories. Sometimes the tactic is effective—Shah opens the
book with a story about being held in a Pakistani torture facility and
questioned as a suspected terrorist because of his film-related travels to
Afghanistan, and he doesn't reveal how that story ended until midway through
the book. At other times, just as in Arabian Nights itself, all the layered stories get in each other's way
and become numbing.
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