Jo Nesbø

 

Turn the page

Alfred Hickling, Jane Housham and Laura Wilson on Paper | Hobson's Island | Piano | The Devil's Star

Saturday 19 November 2005

Paper by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani (Bloomsbury, £7.99)

One of the weirdest instances of grave robbing occurred in the mid-19th century, when Egyptian mummies were exported to America so that the rags could be pulped in the paper mills of Maine. The Persian writer Bahiyyih Nakhjavani includes this among reams of fascinating paper-related facts (interesting to note that the very first paper mill was established in Baghdad in 793) in a poetic account of a Persian scribe's quest to find the perfect sheaf. Nakhjavani's dream-like fable is peopled with a drifting cast of mullahs, moneylenders, envoys and emperors. The frequent passages of paper-fetishism have a fleeting, musical sensuality without ultimately making very much sense: "Each sheet was impeccably trimmed, and as wide as a hand span of hope. Each page was no longer than belief and as cool as the human soul." But as the use of print becomes increasingly prevalent, the scribe finds there's a declining market for exquisite calligraphy inscribed with a sharpened thumbnail: "As the scribal bonds between books and men began to break, Persia became paperless." Wasn't that supposed to have happened in offices about 10 years ago?

Alfred Hickling