For kids: Peddling stories on the Silk Road
Forget Botox and diets, oils, lotions. Humanity discovered the antidote to aging millenniums ago: storytelling. In the narrating and the hearing of a story, in the creating and the disseminating of a story ( and, one hopes, in the reviewing), everyone is young again.
Your body comes alive with frissons and goose bumps; your heart pumps out laughter and tears; your imagination sprints from image to memory and back again. You gasp at a plot twist in a dog- eared tale the way your tongue exults at the salt in a dish you have eaten a hundred times. It may not be new, but it always feels fresh. Like magic.
Daniel Nayeri understands this relationship between storytelling and magic, and finds every opportunity to celebrate it. His latest novel, “The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams,” is about a motley crew journeying along the Silk Road, from one end of Asia to another, selling and buying various wares and working hard to stay alive. The Silk Road, Nayeri writes in his author’s note, is “just about the most magical place I can imagine. I have dreamed of it for most of my life.”
While magic and dreams sound like ingredients for pure, childlike fantasy, “The Many Assassinations” is historical fiction, with background information and a bibliography at the end. Plotwise, though, it’s adventurous, funny and nimble.
A 12- year- old runaway joins a caravan of traders making their way across the Taklamakan Desert in China, and becomes a servant to its loquacious leader, Samir. This man, who names the youngster Monkey, turns out to be a corrupt fellow whom many angry merchants want to kill. The book is the story of those attempted assassinations, and how both Samir and his protege survive them … until a clever plot twist is revealed.
Nayeri regularly educates his readers about the Silk Road. A guessing game regarding religion invokes the Mussalmans, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, pagans, Sikhs and an “almos t - Zo - roastrian.” Characters play an ancient form of chess called “shatranj.”
Nayeri is unerringly precise in his vocabulary: “It was midday at a caravanserai — which you probably know is a station beside the roads where caravans rest,” Monkey explains. During a fight, a knife wound elicits a “wattle” of blood.
In a testy exchange while huddled behind a rock to avoid being blown up, Monkey is chastised for not knowing who Erkhii Mergen is. Another character provides an answer, making sure to mock Monkey at the same time: “The legendary Mongol archer? … Shot out six of the seven suns that were scorching the earth and that’s why we only have one sun? Never mind. It’s a folktale.”
“It’s a folktale.” The many chapters in “The Many Assassinations” are windows into the social and cultural lives of Silk Road traders: not just what they traded, but also how they participated in its lively literary ( and multilingual) traditions. Stories were peddled up and down the Silk Road as frequently as the paper and ink used to collect them. In this particular book, Nayeri has entrusted them to a resilient boy and his dream- selling teacher.
From the beginning, Monkey hints to his readers to be attentive to the details, and simultaneously open to all the possibilities a story can hold.
Monkey is a scrappy scrabbler, orphaned and opportunistic, who learns quickly that a story can just as easily get you out of trouble as put you in it.
Is his the voice of a naive adolescent or a practiced hustler? Is this an honest account or a bespoke forgery? What is more revealing, the story itself or how it is being told? Asked another way, to which details should Nayeri’s readers be paying attention? The story of Monkey and his caravan, or the story Monkey is telling us about his caravan?