April 29, 2004
Caine African Prize
The shortlist for the 2004 Caine Prize has been announced. The finalists are Doreen Baingana (Uganda) for "Hunger," which appeared in The Sun; Brian Chikwava (Zimbabwe) for "Seventh Street Alchemy," which was published in Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe; Parselelelo Kantai (Kenya) for "The Story of Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys Band," which appeared in Kwani?; Monica Arac de Nyeko (Uganda) for Strange Fruit," which appeared online at AuthorMe; and Chika Unigwe (Nigeria) for "The Secret," which was online at Open Wide. All the short-listed authors will receive a travel award, and the winner will take home $15,000. The Caine Prize has been dubbed "The African Booker." Previous winners include Leila Aboulela (Sudan), Helon Habila (Nigeria), Binyavanga Wainaina (Kenya) and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya). I haven't seen coverage of the shortlist anywhere on the major outlets, but if I come across anything, I'll update here.
Thanks to Sefi for the link.
Around the 'Sphere
The lovely and talented Maud Newton has won first prize in the creative writing contest at the City College of New York. Of course, being the humble person that she is, she mentions way at the bottom of this entry about her return to NYC.
During the last couple of days, Carrie A. A. Frye (CAAF) guest-blogged at Maud's site and had lots of interesting material, from poetry and polar exploration to Borges and Poe. Look for CAAF's blog very soon.
God of the Machine has a fantastic parody of one of Terry's recent posts, and Terry loves it.
April 28, 2004
Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever
In Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever men and women with a passion for science try to escape the confines of their gender or social position to practice what they love, and while they're not always successful in doing so, the insights they come by illuminate the arguably greater mysteries of the human heart.
In "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds" a woman uses a letter written by Gregor Mendel about his experiments on peas and hawkweeds to woo a genetics professor, who in turns uses it to dazzle his students, but the story behind the letter often remains unappreciated, just as Mendel's work was during his lifetime.
In "The Littoral Zone," we witness a couple of scientists' unexpected love affair while on a work retreat. Barrett is masterful in her exploration of the ways in which the couple seeks to justify leaving their families.
Nothing that was to come--not the days in court, nor the days they moved, nor the losses of jobs and homes--would ever seem so awful to them as that moment when they first saw their families standing there, unaware and hopeful. Deceitfully, treacherously, Ruby and Jonathan separated and walkled to the people awaiting them.The collection consists of modern-day tales as well as stories about science in less enlightened times. In "Rare Bird," set in Kent in 1762, a woman who is fascinated by aquatic anthropoids is rebuffed in her attempts to disprove a widely held theory about the "hibernation" of swallows.
Christopher is glaring at her. [Sarah Anne] knows what he's thinking: in his new, middle-aged stodginess, assumed unnecessarily early and worn like a borrowed coat, he judges her harshly. She's been forward in entering the conversation, unladylike in offering an opinion that contradicts some of her guests, indelicate in suggesting that she might pursue a flock of birds with a net.Sarah Anne has much in common with the protagonist of "Birds With No Feet," a naturalist who seems to be kept from making much of his finds around the world by his social station back home in pre-revolution America.
In nearly every story, Barrett weaves an impressive amount of scientific information, but the result is never forced or heavy or dull. She has a talent for mixing historical figures (Gregor Mendel, Carl Linnaeus) with fictitious scientists, and making the result not only plausible but entirely engaging. Perhaps the only false note in this otherwise dazzling collection is "The Marburg Sisters," in which the point of view (going from one sister to the other to ther first-person plural) felt a bit contrived.
Still, Barrett has produced a remarkable collection, full of intelligence and grace. Ship Fever is one of the best collections I've read in a while.
New LOC Resource
The Library of Congress has a brand new resource for book lovers, Guide to Poetry & Literature Streaming Video. Compiled by Peter Armenti, it's essentially a big database of video clips of poets, fiction writers, and critics. The clips are varied in nature: book readings, interviews, lectures. I've already spent quite some time browsing through, and it's a site I'll be coming back to for links.
ZYZZYVA Reading
Readers in the San Francisco area may wish to check out the ZYZZYVA reading with Tamim Ansary, Kevin Killian, Roxane Beth Johnson, Micah Perks and Barbara Tomash, which will take place on Tuesday, May 4th at 6 p.m. at The Book Bay, just inside the Grove Street entrance of the San Francisco Main Library
April 27, 2004
Adichie's on the Shortlist!
Regular readers of Moorishgirl will know how much I enjoyed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's debut novel, Purple Hibiscus. The novel was recently picked for the Orange Prize longlist, and now it's made it onto the shortlist. The Guardian has the scoop about Adichie (though, strangely, the article claims Adichie is the only Nigerian writer ever to make a shortlist like this. As Lit Saloon pointed out, Ben Okri won the Booker a few years ago.) Adichie is up against Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake) Shirley Hazzard (The Great Fire) Andrea Levy (Small Island) Gillian Slovo (Ice Road) and Rose Tremain (The Colour).
Related: The Moorishgirl review of the novel and an interview with Adichie.
Arab Reading Culture
The Literary Saloon has a few links on Arab reading culture, both articles being rather depressing reads. I particularly liked Abeer Mishkhas' point about how there always seems to be money for football but not for promoting books.
Arab American Film Festival
Mizna has sent around a call for their second annual Arab film festival. Work must be submitted in VHS, DVD or MiniDV format by May 15. The festival will be held in September 2004.
"Brother Tarantino"
"The Lizard," an Iranian movie poking fun at the Islamic Republic's clerics has become a huge box office hits, with tickets selling out days in advance.
In the film, thief Reza Marmoulak (Reza the Lizard) slips out of a prison hospital in his clerical disguise and takes up the life of a man of the cloth. As a preacher, his irreverent style -- cracking suggestive jokes and referring to "brother (film-maker Quentin) Tarantino" during a sermon -- has cinema audiences unaccustomed to open mockery of the clergy in stitches.I hope this comes out here at some point, it'll be a refreshing break from all the serious (fantastic, but dead serious) movies put out by Iranian filmmakers.
Japanese Pop Novels
Hiroki Sakai, the publisher of English translations of Japanese novels, talks to the Daily Yomiuri about breaking into the American market.
From a small office facing New York's Park Avenue South, the president of Vertical Inc. said his main aim was to win the attention of U.S. readers. Last year, the company published 10 books, including Koji Suzuki's "Ring," Kaoru Kurimoto's "The Guin Saga," Kaori Ekuni's "Twinkle Twinkle" and Osamu Tezuka's "Buddha." The design of each book cover is eye-catching and loud, differing greatly from those of Japanese editions.I suppose the publisher is trying to match expectations of manga-reading Americans by using the garish color covers. Still, I think this is pretty cool.
Zoo, Who?
Scott Kaukonen, who earlier last week had written an editorial for the Missouri Review about his experience submitting his collection to Zoo Press, has won the Ohio State University Press Prize in Short Fiction. Ordination will come out next Spring. Congratulations, Scott.
Atta Excerpt
Nigerian writer Sefi Atta, who earlier this year was short-listed for the storySouth Million Writers Award has a new story up over at Carve Magazine. An excerpt:
We lived in the two-story house my father designed in Shapati Town, his hometown. Our plot had no street number, the street had no telephone lines. My father had had a brick wall built so high that armed robbers would need pole vaults to catapult themselves into the grounds. He must have envisaged them trying despite the odds. On top of his wall were broken bottle pieces; jewels on the crest of his architectural crown. In our garden was his concession to my mother, now an empty swimming pool, shaded by her favorite jacaranda and flame-of-the-forest trees. The pool was four feet at its deepest. My father, God rest his soul, could not swim. He had nightmares of dying by drowning--not by the bullet. That, he never expected in the fortress that was our home.--From "The Lawless" by Sefi Atta.
Unanswerable Questions
The Denver Post tries to answer the question: How does one determine which books will have staying power?
The Y
Newsday has a long feature on the 92nd Street Y, describing the venue and its place in the literary ethos.
Remainders
An interview with John Irving, and a profile of Edith Wharton.
April 26, 2004
Perils of Being Famous
Jen Weiner talks about being mistaken for Lauren Weisberger.
Maalouf's Latest
The Literary Saloon has several links about Amin Maalouf's new book, Origines. I'm not sure when/if the book will come out in the States.
Sex and the Umma
“Who are you?” Maryam asks the man between her legs. “Tabari,” he says, looking up, his black beard glistening from where he has been.Mohja Kahf's column on Sex and the Umma is definitely worth a look.“Tabari who?”
“Tabari the Great Islamic Historian,” he says. He slides back under. Maryam remembers something that troubles her.
“Wait—aren’t you the guy who wrote all those horrible things against women? I heard of you in the mosque halaqa. You’re an asshole.” It’s too bad, she thinks. He is doing such a—oh—such a good job otherwise.
“Aw baby, I’m just misunderstood,” Tabari whimpers.
Link via Kitabkhana, who is relieved to find a woman writer who's not always riffing on the "oppressed, depressed, repressed" theme.
The Shocked, Awed, and Liberated
Turbanhead is providing a mirror site for pictures from the Iraq war. These were taken by a U.S. soldier and linked to by many other sites, including Metafilter. Warning: Graphic images.
We Leave the Jokes to T.Muffle
And on the bleachers of a baseball field across the street from the Hugo House, Adams speaks with Sarah-Katherine Lewis, a self-described sex worker who writes an online journal. She reads an essay she has written about kissing. Lewis, 32, says she hopes to make enough money to earn a living as a writer by the time she's too old to be a sex worker.NPR's Noah Adams talks to starving writers from Seattle.
Jones Profile
There's a nice write-up about Edward P. Jones and The Known World in The Salt Lake Tribune, similar in tone to others that have popped up about the author, and which uniformly seem to portray him as a writer's writer.
The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, was named a notable book by the American Library Association, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and recently capped it all off by winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.More about Jones here.
Lots of writers will say they don't really care whether their work is reviewed (yeah, right) or whether they make a lot of money (yeah, right). Jones, though, really makes you believe in the pure and unadulterated allure of writing, in all its solitary grace and torment.
Horse Lit
Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit has spawned a whole bunch of new books ons horce racing. The Louisville Courier-Journal has a review of several of them, including Funny Cide: How a Horse, a Trainer, a Jockey and a Bunch of High School Buddies Took on the Sheiks and Blue Bloods ... and Won which received a first printing of 250,000 and which the reviewer doesn't deem worth the trouble.
The Scoop on JCO
Ed has the exclusive on Joyce Carol Oates' publishing schedule.
April: I Am No One You KnowThat leaves a full three months free, Ed!
May: You Are No One I Know
June: Love: A Rape Story After A Love Story
July: Brunette: A Novel
September: We Are No One Anyone Knows
October: My Quill Can't Stop
November: Because the Heart Always Patters Twice
December: You Must Remember This Book
April 23, 2004
Keret Online
Nextbook has posted some excellent clips of Israeli author Etgar Keret reading from one of his short stories, and excerpts from an interview with This American Life's Ira Glass.
More on Zoo Press Flap
I've only just now noticed the Missouri Review's Scott Kaukonen's comments on Zoo Press' cancellation of its award. He addresses a point that hasn't yet been commented on by others, namely publisher Neil Azevedo's statement that "the experiment did not unfold the way we had hoped, as, I guess is the nature of experiments." Says Kaukonen:
I did not give my money and my manuscript to Zoo Press so that it could be used in an experiment. I assumed, as I believe any writer who enters such a contest, especially from a reputable source, has the right to assume, that the contest will adhere to the guidelines that it has set forth, advertised, and published. I also assume that the people running the contest have ensured that they will be able to fulfill their obligations, that, in this situation, they'll be able to absorb whatever costs the contest may incur. If money is lost in that first year or if expectations are not met, then there would be no Second Annual Zoo Press Short Fiction Contest. But to abandon the First Annual Zoo Press Short Fiction Contest after accepting entry fees and manuscripts and then announcing that those fees will not be refunded is, quite frankly, unethical.The contest entrants and the rest of the lit blogosphere are still awaiting reaction from Azevedo.
(Thanks to Katrina for the link. )
Conspiracy Theory
In an opinion piece for the Mercury News, Daniel Sneider asks why the White House is focusing so much attention on Bob Woodward's latest book, Plan of Attack. The revelations in the book (see Slate's condensed read for a few) aren't flattering. Sneider offers this theory:
What the White House likes -- and why Bush in fact collaborated with Woodward -- is that the book portrays Bush as the man in charge, as a resolute and decisive leader. It continues the portrait Woodward drew in a previous tome, ``Bush at War,'' about the response to Sept. 11. In this election year, Woodward's book, despite some damaging revelations, is almost a campaign biography.I fear he may have a point. While Bush's approval ratings are slipping, recent allegations don't seem to have the effect on his numbers that one mighte expect.
California Literary Mags
You can listen to SF Chronicle book critic David Kipen reviewing new California literary journals for NPR: Swink, Black Clock, and Los Angeles Review.
April 22, 2004
Read This And Weep
Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho is a household name in most parts of the world. His new novel, Eleven Minutes, was a global best seller last year -- everywhere but in the United States. According to Coelho's publishers, his books have sold 50 million copies in 150 countries -- sales figures comparable to those of John Grisham and J.K. Rowling. But the Coelho phenomenon seems to stop at the shores of the American literary market, which remains stubbornly indifferent to foreign best sellers.NPR catches up with Coelho here. I wasn't sure if he was being facetious when he said,
" Madonna spoke about the book, and President Clinton was photographed reading [it]," Coehlo says. " …I think it's a matter of time."As if. Related: Malaysian writers are told to put their work online to try to reach a wider audience.
Place Your Bets
The shortlist for the international IMPAC Dublin Award, one of the world's largest prizes, was announced four weeks ago. According to this article, Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex was nominated by the largest number of libraries, so he seems like the popular choice. The jury is comprised of Anita Desai, Knut Odegard, Eugene R. Sullivan and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim.
A9 Review
Amazon's new search engine, A9.com, is reviewed here. One feature I hadn't noticed before was the ability to keep track of your searches and to save notes you made. Very nifty.
Would You Like A Mocha With That?
A library in Maryland has started to offer coffee drinks to its patrons as part of a pilot program.
The library staff will monitor for spills, and if damage occurs, it will restrict the drinks and food to the lobby area. Café employees are responsible for cleaning up messes under the county contract.Fair enough, but while the cafe owners will make money, I'm not sure the library will necessarily get more patrons. With recent budget cuts, libraries can't afford to buy new books. So when the choice is between the local library and the B&N...
"A lot of people are concerned about the books having coffee spilled on them, but a lot of time when books are checked out, we don't know where they go," Ortega said. "They go in bathrooms, for crying out loud."
The Condensed Bob Woodward
Slate reads Plan of Attack, so you don't have to. A few choice morsels:
Page 190: In September 2002, Bush tells the press that Iraq can launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes—an assertion that the CIA finds completely phony. Director George Tenet refers to it as the "they-can-attack-in-45-minutes shit."The book is selling like hotcakes, with sales at Barnes & Noble forecast to be in the 60,000 range, according to a WSJ article cited in Publishers Lunch.
Page 182-83: Powell reveals that he detests Rumsfeld's circuitous manner of speaking—"One would think …"; "Some would say …"—which he dubs "third-person passive once removed."
Page 127: When Karl Rove worries about the perception in the media that he's meddling in foreign affairs, Bush says: "Don't worry about it. Condi's territorial. She's a woman."
Page 112: On a Mideast trip, Lynne Cheney lunches with an emir's wife. When do the children here in Bahrain begin school? she asks. The emir's wife reminds Cheney that she's in Qatar.
April 21, 2004
Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club
If you've ever gathered at a friend's house to talk about a novel, relished the conversation, feasted on the food, even made a wise crack about a comment you found inane, you'll delight in Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club.
In the eponymous book group, one man and five women meet once a month to discuss one of Jane Austen�s six novels. Jocelyn, who leads the discussion of Emma, is a middle-aged dog breeder who enjoys playing matchmaker to her best friend, Sylvia. As in the book she cherishes so much, there�s a Mr. Knightley somewhere for Jocelyn, if only she opens herself up to a twenty-first century twist. Allegra, who chooses Sense and Sensibility, is a talented jewelry designer on the rebound from a troubled relationship with her gay partner. Prudie is a high school French teacher who is fond of quoting en fran�ais. She picks Mansfield Park for discussion. Grigg (yes, with an �i�) is a recently laid-off tech worker and sci-fi fanatic. "The first thing you noticed about him was his eyelashes, which were very long and thick. We imagined a lifetime of aunts regretting the waste of those lashes in the face of a boy." Grigg has started reading Jane Austen at the suggestion of Jocelyn, and his selection is Northanger Abbey. Then there�s Bernadette, the lovable, older member of the club, who seems constantly distracted and rambling but is altogether perceptive. She discusses Pride and Prejudice. And lastly, there�s Sylvia, best friend to Jocelyn, mother of Allegra, and recently separated from Daniel. She picks Persuasion.
Fowler�s humor and her sense of irony come through in scene after scene. When Grigg�s dad, worried about the boy�s closeness to his sisters, shows him a magazine with a scantily clad woman on the cover, Grigg is more fascinated by the spider that holds the bra in place. When Allegra talks about her lover�s ease at making up a story about a parachuting accident, we are told that Allegra was impressed because �Anyone who could lie as effortlessly as Corinne was someone to keep on the right side of. You would want her lies told for and not to you.� But the lies do indeed turn out to be told to poor Allegra.
As in Austen�s novels, there are plenty of break-ups and hook-ups, but since Fowler�s book is set in modern-day California, there are quite a few refreshing twists to the tale. And, as in Austen�s novels, the political world around the characters in The Jane Austen Book Club seems to have little bearing on their lives. Witness how the events of September 11 are referred to: "A year earlier, Dean could have accompanied [Prudie] to the gate, held her hand while she waited. Now there was no point in even going in. "
Fowler�s sense of characterization works well with the female members of the club, though it seems to come a little short with Grigg. He never quite comes into a voice fully his own. Even the chapter that revolves around his discussion of Northanger Abbey is told largely from the point of view of the other women, as though he were a spectator.
The novel�s structure (one chapter for each discussion of an Austen novel) is rather clever. Soon, however, structure seems to get in the way. After the epilogue, there's a brief synopsis of all six of Austen�s novels; a section on Austen�s family�s reactions to her work; chronologically sorted comments on Austen by everyone from Charlotte Bront� to Vladimir Nabokov; and mock book club questions written by the characters themselves (the meta book club.) If this sounds like a lot, maybe it is.
Despite this, the book has much to recommend it. It�s a great take on the culture of book groups, an homage to Austen, an engaging story, and I enjoyed it tremendously.
April 20, 2004
Operation Homecoming
The NEA is starting a new program called "Operation Homecoming," in which soldiers will be encouraged to turn in work about their stints in active duty. The works will be workshopped with the likes of Tobias Wolff, Tom Clancy, and Mark Bowden, and some of them will appear in an anthology. According to this Washington Post article,
The program is part oral history project, part literary talent search, and part a writing-as-therapy program for troops, particularly those in Iraq, who have been under extraordinary stress in America's first protracted and messy war since Vietnam.I'm not sure how I feel about this. The troops' literary talent is sure to find its way to publishers (Anthony Swofford's memoir is one recent example) via the same channels as other writers, so why the added encouragement by the NEA? What role will politics play in all this?
WaPo link via Publishers' Lunch.
Heller Interview
The Independent has an interview with Zoe Heller.
In Fine Form
If this novel did not boast the name of Alice Walker, who won acclaim some two decades ago with "The Color Purple," it's hard to imagine how it could have been published. "Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart" is a remarkably awful compendium of inanities. There are New Age inanities: "She had an instinctive understanding, perhaps from birth, that people and plants were relatives." Feminist inanities: "She had seemed to feel, and to wonder aloud, about the possibility that only women, these days, dreamed of rivers, and were alarmed that they were dry." Flower children inanities: "What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain?" And plain old bad writing: "The moment I stood in front of any one of his paintings, she elaborated, my bird nature became activated. I felt I could fly!"La Kakutani reviews Alice Walker's latest book, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart.
They Called In The Fiction Squad
Best headline of the day: Literary magazines found, not bomb.
Opposed, in Voting
The traditional electoral allegiances of American Jews and Arabs have shifted considerably and will be, once again, diametrically opposed, according to new polls.
April 19, 2004
They're As Endangered As the Whales
National Library Week is April 18th to the 24th. The CSM has an opinion piece about the deteriorating state of the nation's libraries and the ALA has launched a new site detailing funding cuts to libraries nationwide.
Add Another One to the Pile
A new book says that Dick Cheney informed the Saudi ambassador of Bush's plans to invade Iraq before Colin Powell was told of the decision. The Administration's behavior has been embarassing for some time, but now it's just kind of boring. I'm still waiting for a book that will have some truly earth-shattering news.
Channeling Cartland
As soon as she passed through the arrivals gate at Aberdeen airport she knew it was him. Maybe it was the way he was standing, legs slightly apart, shoulders back, his face taut with the hunger of a mountain lion. Maybe it was the fact that he was holding a piece of cardboard with her name written on it. She took a deep breath. 'I think it's me you're waiting for. I'm here for the writing course.' 'I'd almost given up on you,' his voice was warm and smooth as a dram of single malt whisky, and as he spoke his gaze licked over her expensively tailored suit. He offered to carry her suitcase. 'It's OK, I can manage,' she stammered, feeling a stealthy blush creeping up her neck.Poor Joanne O'Connor takes a weekend writing course in romantic fiction and finds (horror!) that the attendees aren't all old women with lap dogs. But that's it for the grounbreaking discoveries. Here are the rules:
No inter-racial relationships ('though sheikhs are OK'), no adultery, no one-night stands, no politics, religion (presumably the sheikhs are of the non-muslim variety) or other gritty social issues, no subplots, no same-sex couplings. The hero must be an 'Alpha Male'. He cannot be bald, ginger or short. He cannot be German. The heroine must be of childbearing age (ideally 22-34), she's allowed one illegitimate child, she cannot smoke and she cannot be the man's superior socially or financially.More on the cookie-cutter romances here. Update: Jonathan pointed out different restrictions on romance novels in West Africa.
April 18, 2004
Around The Sphere
Maud segues from a discussion of Nabokov's synaesthesia into a tale of her own sensitivity to sound. Ron reports on the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of Graywolf Press. Ed offers his thoughts on Kill Bill: Volume 2. Bookninja offers a link to the British Library's sound archive, searchable online.
The Best Review in Ages
Choire Sicha has a review of Plum Sykes' Bergdorf Blondes (what, you expect a link?). It starts
BERGDORF BLONDES'' should inspire readers everywhere to rise up and rip one another limbless. It is not impossible that such a spontaneous revolution will begin first in New York City. After encountering this novel's manifestation of cultural illness, the tribes of the outer boroughs may be impelled to march upon Manhattan to enslave the emotionally warped hoarders of jewels and neuroses who reside therein.and only gets better after that (the review, not the book.)
Link first seen at Maud.
Barghouti Review
Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (translated by the multitalented Ahdad Soueif, and with a foreword by the late Edward Said) is out in paperback in Britain. The Guardian has a review by Avi Schlaim.
The literature on the Palestine question is usually so wrapped up in partisanship and polemics as to obscure, or at least to relegate to a secondary plane, the human and emotional side of the problem. It is therefore particularly pleasing to come across a writer who dwells not on politics but on the less familiar aspects of the Palestinian predicament. Mourid Barghouti is a prominent Palestinian poet who writes with great sensitivity and insight about his own experience of exile. But while writing in an autobiographical vein, he throws a great deal of light on the condition of his people.
Monte-Cristo Reexamined
Jonathan Yardley offers a thoughtful reexamination of one of my favorite novels from childhood: The Count of Monte-Cristo.
That I managed to forget just about everything about "Monte Cristo" over the ensuing half-century is wholly within character, but it did have the advantage of leaving me a tabula rasa upon which Dumas was free to work his magic. The only problem is that the second time around "Monte Cristo" struck me as somewhat less than magical. (...) My imperfect recollection is that as a teenager I was untroubled by (...) leisurely digressions from the central story, but as an adult I found myself wanting Dumas to get on with it, to whack a few pages -- a few hundred pages, if truth be told -- out of this elephantine book and get down to business.I have to say that when I reread old favorites I find that they tend to run a bit long, but maybe that's just part of the process of getting older: We have so much less time than we did as children and therefore less patience with books that run as long as Monte-Cristo.
Inmate Writers Can Keep Money
Remember the inmates who, after they had contributed to a literary anthology, were being asked by the State of Connecticut for their royalties in compensation for their incarceration costs? Now that one of the writers has won the PEN First Amendment award, the state is backing down.
Now, however, after PEN made Ms. Lane one of the literary world's newest faces of imperiled free speech by announcing her award last month, Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who filed the suit, says the convicts who contributed to "Couldn't Keep It to Myself" will get to keep their money after all. A settlement was signed late Friday.The fact that the inmates were making less than $10,000 from their royalties so far may have had more than a little to do with the change of heart.
Last Century's Colors
An interesting review of Werner Soller's book An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New by Emily Eakin in the NY Times. The book includes some interesting historical tidbits, like the pamphlet on miscegenation put out by Democratic journalists in a failed bid to stop the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, or the complete text of Ourika, a novel about a Senegalese woman experiencing racism in 19th century France. But Soller's book also mentionsl literary works that celebrated interracial relationships.
April 16, 2004
A Conversation with Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Abba, Nigeria and moved to the United States to attend college. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review and Zoetrope All-Story among others. She has received an O. Henry Award for her story “The American Embassy,” published in Prism International. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published last October and was recently selected for the Orange Prize longlist.
Moorishgirl: I enjoyed Purple Hibiscus tremendously. Eugene is such an interesting character—a Catholic fundamentalist, an abusive husband and father, but also a champion of intellectual freedoms. What did you draw on when you were writing him?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I drew on the idea of character complexity, which applies consistently only in fiction, since many real life people are really one-dimensional and many real-life situations are really clichés. I was also interested in the idea of being sincerely wrong, of not being able to distinguish between righteousness and right.
MG: But I had some trouble with Kambili’s quietness during the book, especially when compared with Amaka.
CNA: Kambili has lived a voiceless life. Amaka hasn’t. Also, Kambili’s hushed telling made it possible to portray the events in a more detached, less intrusive and consequently, I think, more powerful way.
MG: Your book is very sensual, particularly when it comes to food. Were you nostalgic for a Nigerian feast while you were writing?
CNA: I eat mostly Nigerian food here in the US – jollof rice, beans, moi-moi, plantains -- so I wasn’t so much nostalgic as simply keen to celebrate the food I love. More practically, I think details like food work well when drawing a fictional portrait of family life.
MG: You received some glowing reviews (New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, etc.) Did you expect that kind of reception?
CNA: I hoped for a good reception although I was prepared for the worst, mostly because I was writing about a place [which] many agents had told me wasn’t ‘interesting to Americans.’
MG: Do you think that’s true? Are Americans as insular as publishers think?
CNA: I think that Americans -- and I say this as someone wary of generalizations -- are particularly insular when it comes to the subject of Africa. On my book tour, I was often asked variations of this question: do you plan to keep writing about Nigerian characters or will you write about regular people? That said, ‘Americans’ is such a broad, sweeping term and perhaps the population, on average, is not as insular as publishers and agents think.
MG: I’ve seen similar comments about books from nearly every other part of the world: the Middle-East, China, South Asia, etc. Publishers seem quite convinced that readers won’t be interested, so they have this trend now of emphasizing the “universality” of a story. What do you make of that?
CNA: I think this reason is troubling because it suggests that the universality – and therefore the humanity – of the characters [is] negotiable. I’m assuming that whatever universal means, it has to do with basic humanity. Or does it? We need to ask what ‘universality’ means, then, if readers have to be convinced of it. Is universality something to do with the human condition as a whole or just the western human condition? Apparently books about westerners are automatically universal, since no reviewer or publisher assures you of this on, say, the cover of an English novel.
We can’t pretend that Black Africa has not long been viewed as a possibly sub-human place and we can’t pretend that this view doesn’t persist or doesn’t affect how books are read and we can’t pretend that reviews exist in a value-free medium.
My aim is simply to point this out, to make people aware of it, because I have begun to question the sort of terms thrown around in fiction workshops – ‘universal’ and ‘human condition’ – with the assumption that the meanings are absolute. I have been told, for example, that no woman will ever choose to be a junior [second] wife, all things being equal, because such a choice goes against something called the ‘human condition.’
MG: I’d like to read you a quote from an interview with Chinua Achebe in The Paris Review. He said: “When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp . . . fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal. Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn't know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb, that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer.” Do you feel a similar sense of responsibility to be a writer?
CNA: Yes, although my desire to write came long before I was sophisticated enough to understand the responsibility that came with writing as a Black African woman. Responsibility for me, though, has never meant sugar-coating and I am as interested in showing the pock-marks as I am in showing the perfect skin. But it has to be said that five decades after Achebe, the hunters still do most of the telling. The most credible ‘African’ stories in the west are told by non-Africans, people like Ryszard Kapuscinski, who are said to know Africa better than Africans themselves. Of course this matters. The Heart of Darkness image of Africa persists, the sense of Africa as the ‘other,’ a place where the west goes to test its humanness. The only difference today is that the Africans are given an odd quirkiness, which we are supposed to read as the politically-correct ‘dignity,’ and they are not called ‘savage’ although the subtexts usually suggest that they are. I have had supposedly well-educated people tell me that my characters are not ‘African enough’ because they don’t quite fit in the coded language of what African fiction should be (to the west). It is even more troubling to me that only with African books, written by Black Africans about Black Africans, are reviewers (and blurb givers) quick to reassure the reader that the stories are really ‘universal’ as well, as if ‘African’ and ‘Universal’ are perhaps mutually exclusive.
MG: Speaking of Achebe, I’ve always wondered: Is the opening line to Purple Hibiscus a tribute to him?
CNA: It was unintentional, really, but yes, I think it was my unconscious tribute. He is the writer whose work has been most important to me.
MG: Is your book out in Nigeria yet?
CNA: No, not yet. It won’t be out until next year.
MG: How did you hear about the Orange Prize longlist?
CNA: A reporter from the London Times called and said congratulations, and that he wanted to do an interview with me. I was half-asleep and wasn’t sure for a moment what he was talking about.
MG: All right, fess up, how often do you check your Amazon ratings?
CNA: The first two months after the book came out, I checked about five times a day! Now, I hardly do. I think it was the anxiety of first publication where you think nobody will buy the book and you obsess about it until you realize that constantly checking Amazon sales rankings will not make them get better.
MG: You’re working on a new novel, right? What’s it about?
CNA: It’s set in the sixties, before and during the Biafra war, and told from the points of view of a young houseboy, a university lecturer and an Englishman.
MG: You’ve dealt with the Biafra war in one of your short stories-- “Half of A Yellow Sun,” which appeared online in Lit Pot first and in print in Zoetrope All-Story. Is “Half of A Yellow Sun” excerpted from this novel?
CNA: No, the characters are different. The story was my way of taking a ‘first stab’ at the story of the war before I began the novel.
April 15, 2004
Friday Feature
In a continuing effort to provide more varied content on this blog and in addition to the Wednesday reviews, I'm going to try and do something a bit different on Fridays. So, come back tomorrow for an interview with the lovely and amazing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Purple Hibiscus, which is currently on the Orange Prize longlist.
Cute in Japan
Japanese 'cute' is a curious and very contemporary aesthetic, a style, a taste, an affectation: it denotes anything small, vulnerable and childlike that induces a feeling of pitiful love. There are cute expressions, cute gestures and cute ways of standing, with toes turned in. There are cute ways of dressing, too, especially for girls and young women: shoes with buckles, crinolined mini-skirts, mittens, toys worn as accessories, and the ubiquitous socks, some ankle-length, others longer and worn as if in the process of falling down, an effect achieved with special sock-glue.Kitty Hauser reviews two books on style in Japan: Fruits Postcards by Shoichi Aoki and The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan by Donald Richie.
Politics and Art
Would you read a novel by someone whose political opinions make you cringe? The question came up over the recent quote by sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card condemning gay marriage and warning that allowing the state to recognize same-sex unions would result in the fall of Western civilization as we know it (that's the power of gay sex, apparently.) Maud explains her stance not to read Card in this post. Ed offers thoughtful comments, as usual. And Mark discusses the issue in the more general context of art, visual or otherwise.
Writer's Block
Terry has an interesting perspective on writer's block, worth a look for those of us who write at a glacial pace. Terry says he wrote most of his Balanchine book (40,000 words) in about two months.
What happened? Was it simply that my mind had been concentrated wonderfully by the prospect of a hanging? Or might it be that the more you work, the more you can work? I think both factors probably played a part.I did notice lately that since I've been forced (for various reasons) to write at exactly the same time everyday, I start composing sentences in my head as the time approaches. Whatever works, I suppose.