The author of this encyclopaedic book, Richard van Leeuwen, is a lecturer in Islamic studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is a prolific author who has published extensively on the Arabian Nights, including The One Thousand and One Nights: Space, Travel, and Transformation (2007) and (with Ulrich Marzolph) The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (in two volumes, 2004). He is also the first and only translator of the Arabian Nights directly from Arabic into Dutch (1999). What comes as a pleasant surprise in this book is Leeuwen's knowledge and command of twentieth-century fiction. He moves in this work from canonical authors of modernism and postmodernism to Third World novelists. He covers Nobel laureates – Naguib Mahfouz, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk, and Toni Morrison – as well as lesser-known twentieth-century writers – the Libyan Ibrahim al-Faqih, the Cuban Abilio Estévez, the Iranian Bahram Beyzaï, and the Hungarian Gyula Krúdy – giving the reader a sense of unsuspected kinship among these writers, thanks to The One Thousand and One Nights, the common denominator which surfaces in these works.

Van Leeuwen's book is structured in such a way that the reader can pick and choose what set of writers to focus on. This is similar to reading the Nights, where one can skip a story or a set of stories and move to others without compromising the overall coherence of the work. Similarly, the Reader can choose what works or what themes to focus on in this monumental work. Apart from the general introduction that the author provides, each part of the hexagon-like structure is introduced and concluded briefly. Each part has a theme under which other subsets of works are included. Here, as an example, is how the author presents part two of his six-division book, where he concentrates thematically on time. Thus the title of Part 2 is “Capturing the volatility of time”. Within it, there are four subtitles: ‘The return of time” (covering Marcel Proust and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar); “Narration and survival” (covering Vladimir Nabokov and Margaret Atwood); “Desire unbound” (covering The Marquis de Sade and Angela Carter); and “Temporal dystopias” (covering Botho Strauss and Haruki Murakami). As for the other parts, they cover: “Enclosures, journeys, and text”; “The textual universe”; “Narrating history”; “Identifications, impersonations, doubles”; and “Aftermaths: the delusion of politics”.

In this embedding (one section inside another) and forking (the theme or motif splitting into more than one direction), which we come across in this work, are also the hallmarks of the Nights. Though van Leeuwen's book belongs to literary criticism, it has been infiltrated with Shahrazad's techniques and devices. Rather than touching on all the works the author analyses, I will refer to the fascinating section on James Joyce and the Arabian Nights (pp. 245–69). This is a particularly intriguing subsection of the book as it shows how pre-modern literature of the Orient has impacted high modernism. It throws light on two of Joyce's works: Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) and guides us to fathom these enigmatic works, and by extension the corpus of Joyce, via the Nights. In this section van Leeuwen distinguishes between three types of references to the Nights: (1) references to the Nights via popular culture, (2) references to characters and episodes from the Nights, and (3) procedures borrowed from the Nights such as deferral, textual layering, etc. While Ulysses is commonly seen in its relation to the Odyssey, van Leeuwen shows how it corresponds to the Nights; as for Finnegans Wake: “The novel thus resembles the Thousand and One Nights in its structure and concept as a text that consists of a container filled with an irrepressible flow of stories or parts of stories” (p. 266). It is this fluidity and instability of both works that guides us not only to grasp Joyce's last work: such correspondence throws light on the poetics of the Nights through the stylistics of Joyce. This is also the place to point out how the influence of the Nights on Western literature has taken place via translations that vary considerably. Accordingly, the influence of the Arabian Nights should take into account the translation(s) read by an author. Joyce used Burton's translation of the Nights, which Burton claimed his rendering, with its archaisms and neologisms, reproduced Arabic stylistics in English. Van Leeuwen suggests that Joycean experimentation with language is due to Burton's model: “In a kind of proto-Joycean impulse, Burton attempted to break open the English language and fill it, in part, with Arabic elements in order to forge a new language … : it is probably the rather monstrous hybridity of Burton's style that influenced Joyce's radical experiment in linguistic anomaly” (pp. 267–8).

What I find odd in this work is the conclusion. Expecting to find a concluding essay to categorize modes of incorporating the Nights in twentieth-century literature, we find instead an excursion into the narrative universe of Paul Auster. Starting with Auster's first book, The Invention of Solitude (1982), which is part memoir and part critical theory, van Leeuwen sees in it the framework of his subsequent writing. No doubt that the frame of reference of Auster includes the frame story of the Nights, “speak or die”, yet it is difficult to see why his works do not constitute another subsection of the book and are entitled instead “Conclusion”.

In sum, this is a valuable book for courses in World Literature, Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies – in the broad sense of translation that includes how works and themes migrate from one place to another and what happens to them when they do. The excellent indexes (Index of People and Places and Index of Subjects) in this voluminous work are useful tools for such courses and research.