Book Reviews
Variations on Night and Day
Synopsis
Full of Machiavellian intrigue and searing political satire, Variations on Night and Day,
the final volume of Munif's landmark Cities of Salt trilogy, chronicles the creation of a
Persian Gulf nation by a corrupt Arab monarch and conniving British empire builders
From Kirkus Reviews , May 15, 1993
The final installment of Munif's Cities of Salt trilogy, first published in 1989, offers
still another view of the same historical subject: the corruption of traditional Arab
values when Western allegiances substitute power and money for family and tribal
loyalties. Munif's hero this time is Sultan Khureybit of Mooran, whose 1930's friendship
with the British surveyor Hamilton makes him the natural instrument of London's notion
that a single strong sheikh in the area will be easier to deal with than the usual endless
wrangle. Accordingly, Khureybit looks beyond the normal means of consolidating his
power--alliances with other chieftains and wholesale marriages with their daughters--and
begins to attack his neighbors with quiet backing from abroad. With the flight of Ibn
Madi, sultan of Awali, Khureybit's dominion seems secure. But his alliances force him
closer to friends worse than his enemies--from the ferocious chieftain Ibn Mayyah, who
refuses to take prisoners during the siege of Awali, to his latest wife Najma, whose
entrance into his harem sets off a firestorm of backbiting and violence. Tale's end finds
Khureybit still riding high--backed by the British crown and seconded by Hamilton, now
called Abdelsamad on his conversion to Islam--but he's become a paper tiger, an absurd
figure whose power struggles with his old allies even within his family--fights he can't
possibly lose, though they strip him of everything he once loved--grow increasingly
farcical. Munif is no Euro-basher, as his sympathetic, incisive portrait of Hamilton, the
most compelling of his characters, shows. All the more impressive, then, is his satirical
review of a calamitous series of cultural exchanges that leaves his Arab potentate bloated
with borrowed power and utterly without grace or dignity.
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Cities of Salt
Synopsis
A major new Aventura: one of the greatest contemporary novels in the Arabic language,
translated for the first time into English. Reveals and humanizes a society that has for
too long been misunderstood, and should therefore command the serious attention of
American reviewers.
A reader's comment
An excellent historical novel, gracefully translated.
The first book of the trilogy, Cities of Salt, describes the discovery of oil in the
Arabian penninsula and the effect it has on the people living there. As Europeans and
Americans arrive to develop and control the production and sale of the Arabian oil, their
presence inevitably changes the indigenous people for good and bad. Munif articulates both
the political and personal aspects of this interaction and forms an interesting critique
of the rulers' reactions. As both history and literature, Cities of Salt succeeds at the
highest levels (in the Arabic, he includes much of the traditional dialect) and is helped
by a lucid, unobtrusive translation by Peter Theroux.
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