…Repetition is, I might say, a way of insisting that every story contains many stories inside it. The same story can be told in any number of different ways, of course. My novels try to suggest this richness, even though I can only tell a limited number of versions. In other words, I'm a student of Scheherazade — I don't tell the story, I tell how the story has been told. There's an important difference here. The whole tradition of Arabic literature teaches us how important it is. All classical texts tell us that there's a prior authority or source for the story about to be told. There's always a chain of transmitters, or translators, even though each version differs. And in Arabic, the word for 'novel,' riwaya, also means 'version.' In this sense, there's no such thing as pure repetition. To write multiple versions of the same story is to suggest that every story is a form of potential, an opening onto other stories.
The Art of Fiction #233 [The Paris Review, Spring 2017]
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