The History of the Caliph Vathek

By -
The History of the Caliph Vathek, by William Beckford

Beckford wrote Vathek in French in 1782, at a time when there were two fashionable crazes: the Gothic and the Oriental.  Beckford married the two genres in a tale of an Arabian king gone wrong.  His story was published in English under the claim that it was a story directly from the Arabic.  The name Vathek sounds kind of German to me, but the name and the story are very very loosely based on a real person, the Abbasid caliph Al-Wathiq ibn Mutasim, who ruled in the 9th century. 

Vathek is about 150 pages long, and has no chapters; it just goes from episode to episode without a break.  (Much, I suppose, as Beckford wrote it--he claimed it only took him a few days and nights.)  There isn't much in the way of character development.

The story is that Vathek is a powerful caliph with a bad temper (his angry glance can kill people!) and a large thirst for knowledge.  A demon, Giaour, shows up and offers him knowledge and power if he will renounce Islam and worship him instead.  Vathek happily does this; he commits blasphemy, sacrifices children to Giaour, and generally makes everyone miserable.  His mother is expert in black magic and helps him out. 

Vathek however has a very short attention span and keeps breaking his demonic contract, especially when he meets a girl.  They recommit to Giaour together and travel to Hell to meet Eblis (another name for the devil, I think).  For a short time they enjoy luxury and unlimited power, but within a few days it's all over and they fall into eternal torment.

I will admit to sort of skimming this story, which isn't all that great.  You needn't bother unless you're really into the genre.  A funny thing about my ebook copy--it's a direct scan of the original book, and for some reason the Vathek story is bundled with Johnson's Rasselas.  Why?  I do not know.


Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more