wrong on so many levels

Last week I went to the reading that Monica Ali gave at Dutton

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003 at 4:39 pm and is filed under literary life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “wrong on so many levels”

  1. walter Says:
    September 23rd, 2003 at 10:40 pm

    My, oh my! This really makes our fair city look bad. I read somewhere that L.A is the first or second largest book market, but from what I can tell, books here tend to be like everything else, a prop to cast a certain image. They never seem to get read by the people who purchase them but how cool to have a shortlisted Booker on your shelf, right?

  2. moorishgirl Says:
    September 24th, 2003 at 11:14 am

    I forgot to add one thing: Someone asked her if she had a movie deal yet. Er… I think that covers it. Poor girl.

  3. thehiker Says:
    September 25th, 2003 at 8:20 pm

    Actually one of the people asking the weird questions had a British accent and was quite old. Not that there’s anything wrong with old British folks… and not that I’m saying he wasn’t a real Angelino, but I wouldn’t blame our city for those questions. Er, well except for the movie deal one - gotta love Hollywood.

    peace,

    thehiker

  4. Dud Says:
    September 26th, 2003 at 7:34 am

    Well, according to the UK’s Independent On Sunday:

    ‘..Monica Ali(’s).. bittersweet debut novel, Brick Lane, is the object of a fierce bidding war between rival film-makers’

    See you in the multiplex !

    And here’s MA in the Guardian on the kind of flak that she catches at UK readings : -

    ” In an audience recently at the Bengali World Literature Centre in the East End, a woman invited me to take a test. “How can you know what it is like to be a Bengali mother,” she protested, “when you don’t even speak our language? Come on, speak to us in Bangla.” I’ve never subscribed to the “cricket test” and I declined the questioner’s test also. (My Bengali is limited now to some tourist-phrase-type inquiries, a few nursery rhymes or song fragments and a quite extensive culinary vocabulary.)”

    If there’s one thing that unites all races and cultures, it’s suspicion of a fluid or ambiguous ethnic identity…

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