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Salih is an astonishing prose stylist (it's comforting to know that he worked closely with the translator), and his ability is on full display here, using a mix of mediums that tell a seemingly classic story in a modern way. The plot occurs obliquely - wonderful to have a passive lead and an incredibly active, handsome subject - and the retold stories of Mustafa's sexual escapades in London are, as many have pointed out, a conscious subversion of Othello and HEART OF DARKNESS. But I'm more interested in the conscious overlap with DON QUIXOTE, which I haven't seen written about anywhere.

The narrator is much like Cervantes's Cide Hamete Benegeli, an involuntary transcriber of someone else's epic story, and the plot takes a very similar turn. Toward the end of the book, we have a wonderful scene with Mustafa's library, and the narrator is disappointed to see that all the books are in English - they are listed in catalogue, as in QUIXOTE. Mustafa temporarily lost his mind and morality in an attempt to perpetuate the western perception of him as Othello, before, finally, after a long journey, regaining sanity and enjoying a homecoming and a brief, intentional return to normalcy. That is very much the Quixote move, and Salih's conscious choice to write in Arabic, not English, feels like a rebuke of countrymen who only read in English, much like Cervantes was taking on the ghastly chivalric novels of his time.

The problem with indirect books is that sometimes one gets the sense that plot is being withheld for no reason than to withhold it. The outermost frame is written in direct address, and I would be frustrated listening to this storyteller. "Why did you wait 60 pages to tell me that critical plot point?" But there are long descriptive passages here that are as good as anything:

"I lingered by the door as I savoured that agreeable sensation which precedes the moment of meeting my grandfather whenever I return from a journey: a sensation of pure astonishment that that ancient being is still in actual existence upon the earth's surface. When I embrace him I breathe in his unique smell which is a combination of the smell of the large mausoleum in the cemetery and the smell of an infant child. And that thin tranquil voice sets up a bridge between me and the anxious moment that has not yet been formed, and between the moments the events of which have been assimilated and have passed on, have become bricks in an edifice with perspectives and dimensions. By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe."