Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds, by Natalie Zemon Davis, Faber & Faber, 2008, Paperback, 464 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0571234790, £10.99.
Close to completion of reading it, a beautifully designed and comfortable to hold paperback, handy to meet the need of a traveler.
This is the first time I publish a book review out of the standard format of the genre.
Here I employ a bullet list approach listed on a PowerPoint slide deck, following comments, asks and preparations for a discussion with friends for close circle consumption, which I expounded upon live.
Personal reflection
- Bought the book ALC-ALIF bookstore at the American Language Center in Fez, Morocco, October 2022. Makes it an experience of a meta-Orientalism
- The book captures musings on comparisons between Fez and Rome that were similar to mine, on my way from Fez to Rome during the same trip, only some centuries later
Method
- Semi-fictitious reconstruction of context based on speculative loose textual and historical associations generously spiced by conditionals (‘would, could, should, may have, may have NOT’…), and inspired by a mix of literary and historical approaches
- Adding additional layer of imagined story telling vagueness on top of an anyway vague history (‘fog-to-mud’)
Sources Usage
- Virtually anything from the Bible, the Qur’an, Ibn Khaldun to poetry, of which 90% are only remotely associated with the primary topic
- Used as instrumental springboards
Genre
- Fiction or history („a masterpiece of the historian’s craft“ stays on the book cover…)?
- Associative fiction mimicking under the cover of academic historical narration
Conclusion
- The real trickster of the book appears to be the author herself, bridging the two worlds of fiction and academical research writing
- Reminds of a Vera Mutafchieva on steroids
