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Book Reviewed by:"One of the most daring and inventive writers of our time" (Elle) weaves together memoir, manifesto, and a feminist reimagining of One Thousand and One Nights in this impassioned exploration of the power of reading.
A woman is filibustering for her life. Every night she tells a story. Every morning, she lives one more day. One Aladdin Two Lamps cracks open the legendary story of Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to explore new and ancient questions. Who should we trust? Is love the most important thing in the world? Does it matter whether you are honest? What makes us happy?
In her guise as Aladdin—the orphan who changes his world—Jeanette Winterson asks us to reread what we think we know. To look again. Especially to look again at how fiction works in our lives, giving us the courage to change our own narratives and alter endings we wish to subvert. As a young working-class woman, with no obvious future beyond factory work or marriage, Winterson realizes through the power of books that she can read herself as fiction as well as a fact: "I can change the story because I am the story."
An alluring blend of the ancient and the contemporary, One Aladdin Two Lamps ingeniously explores stories and their vital role in our lives. Weaving together fiction, magic, and memoir, Winterson's newest is a tribute to the age-old tradition of storytelling and a radical step into the future—an invitation to look closer at our stories, and thereby ourselves, to imagine the world anew.
Excerpt
One Aladdin, Two Lamps
Morning. Crisp as an apple.
Where are we?
On the street.
Here? In this city?
No. Another place.
When? Now?
Not now. Many years ago.
What are we doing here?
We're going to see a pantomime.
There's a snake of children wrapped around the theatre front to back.
It's eleven o'clock in the morning. The factory where my dad works has decided to take all the workers' children to a show at Christmas time.
I'm wearing a duffle coat and a pair of borrowed shiny patent shoes. I don't know anyone. My dad works in another town and rides his bike to the factory. All weathers. He can't afford the bus. Today is frosty and clear. I am cold in these shoes.
Inside, the small theatre has red velvet seats raked in front of the stage. The carpet is a swirl of acanthus leaves. The smell is toffee and Vimto.
I am on my own at the back. There's a sandwich in my pocket. Breakfast. Eat it.
Above the swagged curtains, there's a plaster medallion of Queen Victoria. She looks down in disapproval ...
Winterson's book is structurally interesting. She essentially shares four different stories at the same time, interweaving them: Shahrazad's story, the story Shahrazad tells, her own story of herself growing up, and the story of our world's past and future. In retelling Shahrazad's tales, Winterson uses her own unique voice and style, often including 21st-century slang and references. She then pivots into her reflections on politics, the economy, history, art, life. A small detail from one of the tales, for example, a shape-shifting creature, inspires her to reflect on something else, such as how women are forced to "shape-shift" to meet social expectations. She frequently jumps from topic to topic, following loose threads in a free-associative way, sharing her views. On the one hand, this is engaging, since it almost feels like we are inside her mind, reading her thoughts as they come. On the other hand, this approach can be tiresome and hard to follow at times...continued
Full Review
(868 words)
(Reviewed by Sofia Chatzistefanou).
Kamila Shamsie, award-winning author of Home Fire
Enchanting, unexpected and razor-sharp. Jeanette Winterson and Shahrazad are the perfect co-pilots to take us into new worlds on the wings of old stories.
Aladdin's Tale: Origins, Adaptations, and Reinterpretation
"Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp" is arguably the most beloved and well-known tale associated with The One Thousand and One Nights, yet it was not originally part of the collection. Its true origins are lost to time and scholars consider it one of the "orphan tales" along with other stories like "Ali Baba" that entered the Nights through later transmissions.
The story first appeared in the West in the early 1700s when Antoine Galland, the French translator of the collection, heard Aladdin's tale in Paris from a young Syrian from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab. Diyab is the earliest known source of the tale, although whether he invented it entirely himself, drew on many existing ...
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Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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