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A man named George Armstrong went to Australia but all he came back with was thruppence and when he got home again he weighed so little his mother put him in a basket and kept him by the fire.
    Inea Bushnaq’s tales from Libya, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Syria – from all over the Arab world – reflect a different kind of life, one full of delicious smells and sights and sounds, fresh coffee, baking bread, rosewater and incense, flowers, embroidery, cloth of gold, apricots, figs. The Iraqi Cinderella wears golden clogs and a pearl comb in her hair. The people might be poor but the imagination is lavish.
    The Arab countries have in common a language and a religion, Islam, and a still predominantly peasant culture in which storytelling as pastime and entertainment has survived in good order rather longer than it has in the advanced industrialised countries, although, as Inea Bushnaq says, television may well deal the
coup de grâce
with amazing speed.
    Her method is quite different from Henry Glassie’s: she has compiled an anthology from a variety of text materials, splicing some together and has selected stories ‘most likely to interest the English reader’. It would be nice to know what criteria she used in picking them out.
    She provides a vast amount of cultural background in a series of introductions to different sections of the collections, with theirmouth-watering titles – Djinn, Ghouls and Afreets, Tales Told in Houses Made of Hair (that is, the goat-hair tents of the Bedouin), Beasts that Roam the Earth, and Birds that Fly with Wings. But this is not a scholarly collection so much as a triumphant, shining, glorious labour of love.
    Perhaps Inea Bushnaq is more cavalier with her sources than a professional folklorist because she has heard many of the stories herself when she was a child and truly feels that they belong to her for just that moment of the telling, when the storyteller makes the story his or her own, the fleeting gift of the storyteller.
    The stories invent a world of marvels – flying carpets, girls from whose mouths fall lilies and jasmine each time they speak, a boy whose ears are so sharp he can hear the dew fall. The cry goes out: ‘A calamity and a scandal! The king’s new queen has given birth to a puppy dog and a water jug!’ A green bird spells out the stark terror of family life: ‘My father’s wife, she took my life. My father ate me for his dinner.’ And once upon a time, there was a woman called Rice Pudding . . .
    (1987)

•   4   •
Danilo Kis:
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
    The scrupulously intelligent stories in
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
are fiction, but also, in an important way,
about
fiction. Implicit in the book is the question that all fiction raises by its very existence: what is real and what is not – and
how can we tell the difference?
In a story called ‘The Legend of the Sleepers’, Danilo Kis, a Yugoslav writer living in Paris, puts it this way: ‘Oh, who can divide dream from reality, day from night, night from dawn, memory from illusion?’
    The question is clearly rhetorical, and Mr Kis’s apparatus of postscript and notes gives shape, purpose and an edgy, more documentary dimension to his storytelling. Mr Kis himself tells us that the stories are all about death – the one truly inescapable reality. Even if one of the legendary sleepers of Ephesus in ‘The Legend of the Sleepers’ may be dreaming his own death, death is the universal end of all our personal histories. The title story, ‘The Encyclopedia of the Dead’, reminds us of that.
    This great encyclopedia is housed, we are told, in the Royal Library in Stockholm. Its many volumes contain complete biographies of everyone who ever lived. There is only one qualification for entry: nobody gets in who is featured in any other reference book. It is a memorial for those without memorials. A woman