The Silence of Scheherazade

The Silence of Scheherazade reminded me, when I started reading it, of One Hundred Years of Solitude, easily one of my favorite books. Though the two are markedly different in setting, theme, and tone, something about the structure of the books made me keep comparing them. Reading the book felt like turning a flower over in my hands. To truly understand the shape, I had to turn over petals and replace them. It isn’t a two-dimensional line, going from beginning to end; the book is three dimensional, jumping not only between plots but also giving nods to things that would happen in the future, or which had already happened in the past.

Because of this, and because the plot intertwines the fates of multiple families, it’s difficult to sum up the book. The easiest thing to say is that it’s ambitious, and that it certainly lives up to that ambition. The only reason it’s four stars rather than five is that some of the text felt stiffly written, and I couldn’t tell whether that had come from the author, the translator, or a style of storytelling that simply doesn’t always translate well into English.