A disquieting book ... The power of Nights lies in its versatile technique ... There are bits about AI and Sam Altman, a few affecting set pieces on Christianity, then she lapses into clichés ... Despite these flaws, One Aladdin Two Lamps contains spectacular genies of its own, particularly when the author follows her intuition. Again and again Winterson surprises us. Her Nights unfold as a series of opinion pieces, with Shahrazad (and Winterson) as columnists advocating for social justice. She links class commentary to Nights, with storytelling a prized commodity not confined to elites but open to all, from every walk of life, an embarrassment of riches.
Winterson, a justly celebrated novelist, critic and memoirist, uses all the genres at her disposal to retell some of Scheherazade’s stories, examine them historically and personally, and extract from them lessons about life in the present moment. The result is an often insightful but finally unsuccessful book that falters under its own arguments. It’s a common misstep in these types of works — the instinct, via playful explorations of ancient or classic literature, to inject more into the text than is really there.
A dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help ... Each chapter opens with a pithy retelling of one of Shahrazad’s tales, spritzed with 21st-century idiom ... It feels thrillingly direct, even when her views are run of the mill ... More unorthodox is Winterson’s embrace of big tech’s potential to redefine selfhood ... It’s hard to reconcile this with the general thrust of her politics, though the idea that fallen humanity might learn a thing or two from a disembodied redeemer perhaps bears the trace of Winterson’s evangelical upbringing, written about elsewhere and revisited here.
Winterson’s bibliography continues to sprout extensively ... One Aladdin Two Lamps is harder to categorize, being a retelling of a few tales from One Thousand and One Nights, interspersed with observations, memories and exhortations ... Just as the inventiveness of the tales in One Thousand and One Nights is always undercut by the grimness of their framing device, so Winterson’s verbal exuberance is both playful and deadly serious; she has the intensity of someone who is demolishing you at chess while maintaining that it’s only a game. Her tone can be didactic ... Winterson’s highly personal readings of the stories are engaging. Her versions have a clipped and cryptic simplicity as she teases out contemporary relevance ... With its heartfelt evocation of the power of literature, One Aladdin Two Lamps is a passionate hymn to the supreme values of human imagination, generosity and love.
Having the narrative constantly interrupted to hear these banal political points becomes incredibly frustrating. The reader starts to empathise with the murderous king – desperately waiting for more of the story, dreading the dawn.
A prolific writer across a range of genres, Winterson examines the richness of One Thousand and One Nights to argue passionately for the power of imagination. Melding memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism, she pays homage to Shahrazad, consummate inventor of seductive tales, who enlightens her captor—and would-be executioner, the Sultan Shahryar—about the power of imagination ... An ardent defense of storytelling.
