The Thousand Nights And One Night By Jan Pienkowski And David Walser 2007 New

The Thousand Nights and One Night by Jan Pienkowski and David Walser, 2007
Puffin Books.  2007.  
ISBN: 978-0-141-38288-3. 160pp.

There is something I want to hear …
Aladdin.  Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.  Sinbad the Sailor.  Theyre the stories many of us grew up with and are so much part of our mental luggage that most of us have probably long since stopped thinking about them as anything other than fairy tales thanks in part to the many sanitized, family-friendly Hollywood versions and also Rimsky-Korsakovs insanely romantic, eminently hummable music.  But their origin is dark;  very dark indeed.
King Shahryar, cuckolded by his first wife, vows never to be betrayed again and so decides to take a new bride each night and have her beheaded the following morning. After three years, all the eligible girls are either dead or have left the city.  The only two remaining are the daughters of the Wazir, Shahrazade and Dunyazade.  Shahrazade is an exceptionally intelligent, well-read and accomplished young woman, and she volunteers herself as the Kings next bride.  Shes a woman with a plan.
That night, she goes to the Kings bedchamber, but has a request;  that she be allowed to see  her sister one last time to take her leave of her.  Dunyazade arrives and, having been previously primed, asks Shahrazade for one last story.  The story goes on all night and, just as the cock crows to announce the dawn, Shahrazade stops leaving the story at a crucial point.
When the Wazir comes to take his daughter away for execution, the King asks him to leave her with him for another night.
There is something I want to hear.
And so Shahrazade and Dunyazade continue, for one thousand and one nights three years -  by which time, the King has inevitably fallen in love with his bride …
No-one knows for sure how old the unconnected tales contained in The Thousand Nights and One Night are.  Some may date back to the 7th or 8th Century.  The framing story allowed more tales to be added over the years, and probably took their final form some time in the 14th Century.  They were brought to the West by the Frenchman Antoine Galland in the 18th Century, but it was the Victorian Explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Burton who made them famous, with his monumental 12 volume translation from the Arabic.
This gorgeous book with gilt page edges and a silken bookmark contains just six of the stories, elegantly retold for young readers by David Walser and illustrated by Jan Pienkowski.   His instantly recognizable trademark silhouettes are displayed against glowing backgrounds, embellished with silver and displayed like oriental rugs.  Your first impression is that theyre simply beautiful pictures, but as always with Pienkowski, the more closely you look, the more you see;  humour, terror, darkness and whimsy all co-existing, sometimes in the same picture.  Kasims dismembered body hangs from a hook in the ceiling and is sewn back together by the tailor, his spectacles perched primly on the end of his nose; illicit lovers caught in flagrante are chopped cleanly in half by the enraged King … their limbs so entangled, you cant quite decide what goes where;  the forty thieves are dispatched in their jars by the enterprising Morgana  by means of boiling oil …  every picture rewards careful scrutiny.
This book may have been published by Puffin, but Id issue a word of warning; its not suitable for young children unless you want to find yourself answering some very tricky questions.  Walser and Pienkowski never lose sight of the basic grimness of either the framing story or the tales themselves, which is entirely as it should be.