Where Hajji Baba Has a Lot of Jobs

The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isfahan by James Morier
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I generally like stories set in Persia or Arabia or lands near there, with adventurers making their way in the world, crossing deserts and seas. A Thousand and One Nights, fantasies with Middle Eastern-inspired settings, pulp fiction, Harold Lamb historical novels--love them all. I hoped to love this, too, but I just sorta liked it. A little.

So, IMO, it's okay. Written in the 1800s by a British member of an embassy to Persia, a man who spent years there, it shows his interest in the lands from Afghanistan to Turkey, and in the people, including their neighbors in Georgia and Armenia and Russia and India. It is filled with detail that makes the story seem plausible and real, giving the reader one perspective on that part of the world in the early 19th century. Whether the author is fair towards the people or shows prejudice I can't really say; it seems like he has a lot of affection for the topic, the place, and the people.

There's an aspect of it that put me off and made it hard to just sit down and finish this book. (I spread it out over 5 months.) This same issue is fully present in a lot of stories with similar settings, including the stories in A Thousand and One Nights, and that text, at least, did not come from the pen of a Western man, so maybe the depiction is accurate. But bit by bit, it destroys my interest in any of the characters.

I'm talking about the way everyone in the story seems to be working for their own self-interest at all times, in a way that feels very unethical and underhanded, though it's treated as normal and even wise throughout. No matter what job they have, what responsibilities, what career, the characters are all trying to take advantage of everyone else. Hajji Baba, the protagonist, is a decent man, no better or worse than anyone else, and he is pretty good with his friends, but over the course of the novel has any number of jobs, and in every job he finds a way to enrich himself in an unethical way. He and others get in trouble when caught out, some even being put to death, but nobody really thinks they did anything wrong. It's treated as wisdom to demand bribes in government positions, and skim a little off the top, and cheat the customers.

In addition, Hajji Baba is incredibly focused on status, on showing others that he has moved up in the world, and every time he gets a small advantage he struts and lords it over others. Sometimes, when it goes wrong, he seems like he has learned a small lesson, but then he forgets. Everyone around him is doing the same. Even the mullahs and dervishes, men expected to be more holy than the others, are shown to be self-serving, practicing on the credulity of others.

I paint it a little dark, probably, but this is the aspect of the novel that made it hard to finish. I was rooting for Hajji, who feels like a picaresque hero making his way in the world and learning how to be a better person, and that's the framing that I imagined organized the story. He's a barber, then a a cigarette seller, then a captive of the Kurds, then a physician's servant, and it goes on and on. But he doesn't grow much. Instead, he's a kind of George Costanza, who is pretty much the same at the end as he was at the beginning. He's sort of a rogue (proved by the scene in Istanbul when he convinces a beautiful widow that he's rich enough to marry her), and sometimes a fool (well, same scene, but lots of other times, too), but despite his tricks, he's just virtuous enough that we keep hoping he'll come good in the end.

This is meant to be satire, of course, though the tone of the novel is adventurous and hopeful, which is what tricked me--and what allows me to give this a 3/5 instead of a lower rating. Oh, and the fact that the edition, a 1937 hardcover with drawings and color paintings all through it, is beautiful. That helped.

Apparently, in the sequel, when Hajji is part of an embassy to England, the author satirizes that country instead. I don't think I'll be joining him on that journey.

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Where It's Pretty Damn Awesome

Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This epic poem of Persia, written about 1000 years ago, traces the legendary line of kings from greatest antiquity to the coming of the Arabs and Islam. It's a giant book, filled with heroes, villains, warriors, kings, sorcerers, demons, holy men, and humble folk, all mixed in a story of war and invasion and intrigues, with the founding of cities, great marriages and the cementing of treaties, and the emergence of new nations. There are good kings and bad kings, great champions and shameful cowards, wise counselors and scheming backstabbers, loving wives and self-serving lovers. Some genuine figures from history can be found here, along with a rough outline of dynasties and their dealings with neighboring powers, but most of it is so fictionalized that it reads like myth. That's okay; it's cool myth. It clocks in at almost 1000 pages, even with a few sections summarized rather than translated, so it isn't the type of thing likely to be picked up by casual readers in the West, but I think anyone led to it with any sort of interest will find a lot to enjoy and learn from here.

The original is told in rhyming couplets, and I'm glad the translator didn't attempt that here. Only in a relatively few places--passages that seemed more like song in the original, ten or twenty lines at a time--did he render it in rhyming English couplets, and I felt like that worked. (It reads kinda like the Lord of the Rings, with lots of prose broken up by a song every now and again.) For the most part, the story is translated in very readable and comprehensible prose. Of course, readers like me won't have a strong grounding in the social norms of 3rd Century BCE Persia (for example), so a lot may get by me or other readers, but it feels pretty straightforward anyway. The attitude toward commoners reminds me a lot of British history, so that the way a successful general, for instance, gets snubbed by the king owing to his common origin seems ridiculous and wrong, but it tracks with a lot of cultural traditions I already know about. A lot of it was like that.

One of the best figures in the story is Rostam. As the king's greatest warrior and champion for a long time (hundreds of years, apparently) he always is respected for his prowess, his success, and his noble bloodlines, but as he is not exactly Persian, he is never quite as accepted as others in the story. After he saves the king (again) he's sent back, with thanks, to his homeland. I had a hard time understanding what was going on with him, why he was celebrated but not completely trusted, and it's because (I guess?) he's from Zabolistan, his mother from around Kabul, making him marginalized in a way that I couldn't quite sort out. At any rate, his stories are the most fun. From the back of a giant horse named Rakhsh, with arrows bouncing off him, he defeats men by the dozens, pulling them off their horses. For the king, he wins battle after battle, campaign after campaign, and the king always rewards him with more camels and elephants and servants and hunting cheetahs, pouring gemstones over his head and giving him huge banquets. They love him and celebrate him but never quite embrace him, always mistrusting him a little, maybe like Caesar with his troops coming too near Rome. Anyway, Rostam is an ancient superhero, a good guy in a rough world, and he has enough traumatic backstory and bitter life experience to suit any comic book or movie fan. (I'm sure there are lots of series about the character in Farsi or something. I haven't looked yet.)

It's easy to read this as an adventure story and enjoy it on that level, which I mostly did. I also liked reading it as a sort of window into historical belief and cultural traditions, including the poetic norms and the role of literature, and I found lots to think about there. No doubt there are many other levels of appreciation and study enjoyed by other readers, but I'm not the guy for that right now, so I'll have to be happy with my bit. But I suspect lots of people who haven't heard of this (like I hadn't until pretty recently) would find this both interesting and entertaining and might find room in their life to give it a shot.

Recommended for those souls.

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Where Myke Cole Proves His Point and Pisses Off RWNJ's

The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy by Myke Cole
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an informative, entertaining, persuasive reckoning of the real character of Sparta and Spartan history. Myke Cole writes well, of course, but what's most impressive about this book is his careful scholarship. A great deal of study went into this book.

The author is reacting to the right-wing fetishizing of Spartan training and Spartan domination in war--supposed, one must add. Because of modern mythologizing, Sparta has come to hold a strange position of honor among gun lovers and others on the far right, and Myke Cole does an amazing job of setting the record straight here. He does it methodically, chronicling the victories and defeats, the bribes offered and bribes taken, the errors and oversights and bungled campaigns over centuries, giving credit where credit is due but also brutally casting in sharp relief all of the deviations from the myth of Spartan invincibility and Spartan honor.

The argument is devastating and undeniable.

What I like is how Cole brings the reader along the whole time. Every example of Spartan fallibility is brought back to the main argument, showing how it doesn't match the myth. Everything is made explicit, and the thousandth (possible exaggeration) time he tells us how they should have scouted ahead and walked into an ambush or refused to innovate and got overrun or relied too much on hoplites and got beaten by archers, the reader knows that he has proven his point. Sure, the Spartans were good fighters, better trained than the typical fighters of the time, but as a culture they had huge blind spots that an innate conservatism made almost impossible to correct.

What I found most interesting to learn was how the Peers--the heart of Spartan society and army--dwindled in numbers over time because of a rigid economic system that squeezed families out if their wealth dropped below a certain point. Instead of broadening the base, instead of reforming the system, they allowed their greatest asset to dwindle. They would rather have fewer Peers every year than allow undeserving citizens to qualify.

They believed their own PR, and they choked on it. It was a slow moving tragedy.

The strength of this book--a minute recitation of historical events in context--becomes tedious, I'll admit. I enjoyed reading about their history to a point, but the last third got hard to read. I stopped caring about the parade of names and places that I had never heard of before. (That's on me, btw.) But it serves its purpose by being comprehensive, which it absolutely must be to make his point. Cole doesn't overlook any part of their history, laying it all out for the reader, and this completeness seals the deal.

This is an excellent education in Spartan history in particular and Greek history in general and should be read with interest by anyone curious about the topic. Excellent scholarship (with sources constantly declared), clear prose, and an unrelenting focus on the argument he is making ensures that this book achieves its purposes, not least of which is to provide the reader with an engaging and entertaining education.

Highly recommended.

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