July 28, 2005

See Ya

That's all for Moorishgirl this week. Fellow writer Randa Jarrar guest blogs here tomorrow. I will be back on Monday. Have a great weekend!

Giveaway: Start Making Sense

I received a copy of Start Making Sense a couple of weeks ago in the mail, and figured it would make for a nice giveaway. It's an anthology of essays about how liberals can "turn the lessons of election 2004 into winning progressive politics." Contributors include Howard Dean, Arianna Huffington, George Lakoff, Amy Goodman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Barack Obama, and Markos Moulitsakis Zuniga (a.k.a. Daily Kos).

You know the rules. First person to email me at llalami at yahoo dot com with the subject line "start making sense" will get a copy in the mail.

Update: The winner is Stephen S. from Los Angeles.

Mizna 7:1

The summer 2005 issue of Mizna is now available, with contributions by D.H. Melhem, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, and the always hilarious Dean Obeidallah. And the cover art is, once again, outstanding.

Bay Area Event

Those of you in the Bay area might like to check out Night Train Magazine's fifth issue launch at Zebulon's Lounge in Petaluma on August 2nd. Readers include Bruce Bauman, Jordan Rosenfeld and Susan Henderson. Details here.

July 27, 2005

Nedjma's The Almond

The appetite of Western readers for books about Muslim women shows no sign of declining. Take, for example, The Almond, a novel written by the pseudonymous Nedjma, billed as "the first erotic novel to be written by a Muslim woman." It became an instant hit in France when it was published last year, selling nearly 50,000 copies. It received enthusiastic reviews from Alexie Toca in Lire and Marianne Payot in L'Express, and was recommended in Elle and Le Point. Foreign rights were quickly sold in the UK, Germany, Italy, Holland, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Finland, and elsewhere garnering a total of 500,000 Euros for the author.

When it was published in the United States last month, The Almond received a starred review from Publishers' Weekly and considerable coverage in the New York Times (a Sunday review and an author profile.) At a time when only 3% of fiction published in the US today originally appeared in another language and when otherwise internationally renowned authors are having trouble finding American publishers, the attention heaped on The Almond is quite rare. But it is not surprising. It's an excellent time to be writing about the "plight of Muslim women," about "life behind the veil," about "taboos in Islam" and so on. What is troubling, however, is that, in their rush to hear about the sex lives of Muslim women, few reviewers have bothered to engage the novel critically. And, even more telling, none of these reviewers appear to be Muslim, Arab, or North African, much less Moroccan.

The story told in The Almond is one many readers of erotica will recognize: A village girl (Badra) escapes from her loveless and sexually barren marriage to the big city (Tangier) where she lives with a liberal relative (Aunt Selma) and meets a handsome, experienced man (Driss). He introduces her to the pleasures of the flesh, and the two of them carry on a torrid affair, ultimately ruined by one of the lovers' insatiable desire for novelty. The book is written in a straightforward style that occasionally manages to rise above the mundane, particularly in Nedjma's sexy description of Badra's first night with Driss, which is written with boldness and obvious pleasure.

Most of the novel, however, is consumed with descriptions of Badra's village life, which contrasts sharply with the more liberal one she has in Tangier. To the careful reader, there are many details that make these accounts of life in Morocco rather unconvincing. For instance, Badra claims to love the comedian "Bzou" a curious amalgam of the famous comedic duo Bziz ou Baz, who ruled the stand-up scene in Morocco in the 1980s and who were intermittently banned in the 1990s. Elsewhere, a saint's mausoleum is erroneously referred to as Sidi Brahmin, a rather Indianized version of the real saint, Brahim. A man who falls in love with Badra, bursts out that he has come for the "bent el hassab u nnassab," an Egyptian expression that seems rather out of place in the medina of Tangier. The woman who comes to dress Badra for her wedding is named Neggafa, without a hint of irony. (Neggafas are a cross between hairdressers and wedding planners, and their role is to prepare the bride for her big day. Imagine if a novel featured a character named "Hairdresser" while everyone else is blessed with simple names like John and Jane.) There are references to village brides wandering as "far as the sand dunes," a rather difficult geographical undertaking since they are in the North of Morocco, hundreds of miles away from the Sahara. In the hammam, young Badra describes women who carefully wrap themselves in big cloths and hide behind bathroom doors before undressing. Clearly, Nedjma has never stepped into a Moroccan hammam.

But does any of this matter?

Probably not. After all, The Almond is a work of fiction, not a treatise on village life in Morocco. However, if the novel's problems were simply restricted to authenticity, they could easily be shrugged off and attributed to poor research. The greater problem here is not factual truth; it is emotional truth. The characters in this book never fully rise above the caricature, never convince us that their struggles are real, never make us feel any emotions for them beside sorrow or titillation. Badra's mother, sister, cousins, friends and neighbors all make brief appearances in order to deliver their lines of dialogues like so many grenades. They service the plot, and then they disappear. Unsurprisingly, the roles that they have been given are to demonstrate, bit by bit, their sexual repression. Here's the long-suffering mother who advises Badra that she "must accept her fate like the rest of us." Here's the mother-in-law who ties Badra down to her bed to enable the husband to deflower her more easily. Here's the sister who leans over and whispers, "Close your eyes, bite your lips, and think of something else." Here's the sister-in-law, who is treated like a leper because she had the misfortune of getting pregnant out of wedlock. None of these characters are memorable, none stick around long enough to have a distinct identity. They are only ideas, not people made of flesh and blood, with desires and dislikes, aspirations and contradictions. If all writing is a war against clich�, then Nedjma must be an avowed pacifist.

In the prologue to The Almond, Nedjma declares, "My ambition is to give back to the women of my blood the power of speech confiscated by their fathers, brothers, and husbands." Despite this lofty claim, there can be little doubt that this book was not written for an Arab audience, but, rather, for Western readers, for those among them who will be suitably shocked at the catalog of horrors perpetrated on women, those who will be flattered when they are told that having "European skin" is desirable, those who will nod with approbation at Driss's literary recommendations (Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian, Louis Aragon). This book is not literature; it is comfort. And I prefer to get my comfort by other means.

When she appeared on Thierry Ardisson's television show "Tout Le Monde En Parle" in France, Nedjma hid behind a hat and glasses, and her voice was altered. The camouflage was necessary, she said, because she feared reprisals from Islamists for the erotic material in her novel. And yet, for years, Moroccan women have been writing about their lives, including their sex lives, without the need for such simulacrum. Who bothered Fatema Mernissi when she wrote Dreams of Trespass and Beyond The Veil? Who bothered Soumaya Naamane-Guessous when she published her wide-ranging study of sexual practices among men and women, Au Dela De Toute Pudeur? Who bothered Ghita El Khayat when she published The Affair? That Nedjma, who's written a novel that is so unremarkable, could claim that she fears for her life is not only ludicrous, it is an insult to the women who dare to speak about their condition, face unveiled, and live with the consequences.

July 26, 2005

Tahar Ben Jelloun Detained At Airport

In an article published in the Spanish paper La Vanguardia (full text here), IMPAC-award winning author Tahar Ben Jelloun recounts an airport anecdote that I thought worth quoting:

El pasado mes de marzo fui invitado a Estados Unidos por la prestigiosa Universidad de Princeton para dar una serie de conferencias. Subo al avión, sé que la compañía tiene que comunicar la lista de los pasajeros que se disponen a entrar en suelo estadounidense. Como todos, relleno los impresos que nos distribuyen y que hay que entregar a la policía de fronteras. Tengo un pasaporte francés. Lo presento. En cuanto el policía estadounidense ve un nombre árabe, se pone a teclear en el ordenador durante cinco minutos, entrega mis documentos a otro agente y luego me pide que lo siga a un despacho situado al final del aeropuerto. Me instalan en una sala donde observo la presencia de otros árabes. Angustiado, no digo nada. Espero. Lo sé, soy sospechoso. ¿ De qué? ¿ Qué he hecho? Empiezo a preguntarme qué puedo haber hecho. Me digo que quizá he cometido un delito y que mi memoria lo ha borrado. Espero. Pienso en K., el personaje de El proceso de Kafka. A veces basta con una nadería para caer en el absurdo. No es posible leer nada en el rostro del agente encargado de mis papeles. Lo miro y bajo los ojos. Empiezo a tener miedo. Me digo: ¿ y si me confunde con otra persona que se llama igual que yo, con alguien buscado? Para cuando se demostrara el error ya estaría en Guantánamo. Crece la tensión. Espero, no me atrevo a preguntar qué pasa. Me han dicho que nunca hay que protestar en estos casos.

Al cabo de cuarenta minutos, el agente me llama y me hace una serie de preguntas. Mi inglés es deficiente. Respondo en francés y luego en inglés aproximado. Me hace preguntas trampa: ¿ quién es Amin? Es mi hijo. ¿ Cuál es su fecha de nacimiento? De pronto sufro un lapsus de memoria. Doy la de otro de mis hijos. Le muestro la invitación de Princeton. No queda muy intimidado. Sigue escribiendo en el teclado del ordenador. Entonces me acuerdo de un artículo que escribí sobre la guerra de Iraq donde pedía que Bush fuera llevado ante el Tribunal Penal Internacional por haber matado a inocentes en Iraq. Me digo que la policía me retiene por eso. Tras un momento de silencio en que habla con otro agente, me devuelve el pasaporte. Salgo, veo mi maleta sola en la cinta. Los otros pasajeros, europeos, no han sido sometidos a interrogatorio alguno.

Essentially, Ben Jelloun says that he was invited to give a series of talks at Princeton last March. Upon arriving at the airport, he presented his French passport. The officer looked at his Arab name, spent a few minutes typing on his keyboard, then took him to a waiting area at the other end of the airport with other Arabs. After a 40-minute wait, he was asked a few questions, like "Who is Amin?" "My son." "What is his date of birth?"

Ben Jelloun showed the officer his invitation from Princeton, but, he said, the man "didn't seem impressed." Then, Ben Jelloun remembered an article he'd written the year before, in which he suggested that President Bush be tried by the International Tribunal for the killing of innocent Iraqis*. After some delay, he was given his passport back and allowed to collect his luggage.

Ben Jelloun uses the anecdote to illustrate the clash between Occident and Orient, one a powerful, easily-recognizable mass, the other a mosaic of countries sometimes situated in Asia, the Middle-East, or North Africa. He argues that while the clash of civilizations is a simplistic way of looking at how cultures interact, the clash of ignorances is a reality, and until we begin to know each other, we have no hope of understanding and respecting one another.

Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun is the Goncourt- and IMPAC-award winning author of more than ten novels, four collections of poetry, several memoirs, plays, and anthologies. He resides in Paris.

Link via Label ASH.

*Thanks to David R. for the clarification

Neale Desousa Recommends

"With all that is going on in Iraq and the world, all the Harry Potter and chick Lit discussions need to take a hiatus," Desousa says. "Not that I do not read strictly for entertainment. But we are running out of time and in this frame of mind I went out and bought The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. It's a story of a white South African woman's journey to the village of her Muslim lover. I think there is no way to understand a religion without experiencing the culture that nurtures it and this book takes its time (another virtue one needs to develop when reading serious lit). It's a slim novel and it's amazing how I am not feeling rushed to finish it, but instead am savoring it, one awkward compromise at a time. Ever since I read The House Gun, I have liked Gordimer's writing. Her treatment of gay men in the novel was so subtly woven into the broader conflict of race."

Born in Kenya, raised in Goa, corrupted and educated in Bombay, Neale Desousa now lives in Los Angeles. His work has been published in Chiron Review, Slipstream, and is forthcoming in Swink.

July 25, 2005

We're Proud of Her

Maud Newton's latest book review appears in the New York Times. It's a critique of Josh Emmon's The Loss of Leon Meed, which she finds "promising but rickety."

Danticat on Iraq

Novelist Edwidge Danticat contributes an Op-Ed piece to the Albany Times Union, in which she compares the U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915 with that of Iraq. The war that was supposed to bring democracy to the Carribbean island lasted 19 years, though its effects would last many more years. Now, Danticat writes,

Few Americans are aware their country once occupied ours, and for such a long time. This is not surprising, for as one Haitian proverb suggests, while those who give the blows can easily forget, the ones who carry the scar have no choice but to remember.

While it takes American leaders and their armed enforcers just a few hours, days, weeks, months to rewrite another sovereign nation's history, it takes more than 90 years to overcome the devastations caused by such an operation, to replace the irreplaceable, the dead lost, the spirits quelled, to steer an entire generation out of the shadows of dependency, to meet fellow citizens across carefully constructed divides and become halfway whole again.

Read the entire piece here.

Desertion Review

I've been raving about Abdulrazak Gurnah's new novel, Desertion for quite a while on this blog, so it was a delight to see it get a nice write up in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Aboulela Profile

The Scostman has a lengthy profile of Edinburgh-based Sudanese writer and inaugural Caine Prize winner Leila Aboulela, whose new novel Minaret comes out here in the States in October. Yes, the inevitable comparison to Zadie Smith is made. (Reporters seem unable to avoid it whenever they see a black or mixed-race writer.)

Doctorow in Farsi

E.L. Doctorow's City of God has been translated into Persian.

AK Comics Does San Diego

AK Comics, the Egyptian company that started a series of comic books on Mid-East superheroes was present at Comic-Con, and drew some attention from convention goers.

Related:
Mid-East Superheroes

Weekend Report

I've hit a rough patch with my novel, and the writing isn't going as smoothly as in previous weeks. Posting may be a little sporadic over the next few days.

July 23, 2005

Sharm El Sheikh Attacks

Bloody hell. Car bombs kill 88 people. And the horrible cycle of terror and murder, fear and condemnation, revenge and retaliation starts all over again. It's sickening.

The L.A Times has a description of reaction on the ground, and a little snippet about the political significance of Sharm El Sheikh.

Words fail.

July 21, 2005

End of Blogging Week

That's it for me this week. Fellow writer Randa Jarrar usually blogs here on Fridays, so come by and say hello. I will be back later this weekend or on Monday, with more news, a book review, another recommendation, and assorted commentary.

Salman Rushdie in Brazil

The CSM catches up with Salman Rushdie, who is in the Brazilian city of Paraty to attend its literary festival.

Since the fatwa was lifted in 1998, Rushdie's life has gradually been returning to that of an international literary superstar, with foreign travel, speeches and appearances, and even a glamorous model wife. He has taken on a very public role as the president of the PEN American Center, a writers' human rights organization, and feels at ease doing all the things he did before the death sentence was imposed by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Shuttling between his two homes in London and New York without bodyguards shadowing his every step, Rushdie is in jovial form.

Even being stopped in the street can bring a smile to Rushdie - despite his longstanding reputation for grumpiness. "It's not so bad to have lots of people interested in what you write," Rushdie says when asked if the attention bothers him. "The people who come up to me are mostly coming up because they are interested in something I have written. Sometimes it can become intrusive, but on the whole it is not bad, really."

There's also lots of praise in the article for Rushdie's latest novel, Shalimar the Clown, which I'm reading at the moment (and enjoying quite a bit.)

What Do They Have On You?

It looks like the FBI was "monitoring" organizations like the ACLU and has amassed approximately 1,173 pages of material. A lawsuit have been filed for access to the files.

Norton Names 9/11 Charities

The NY Times's Edward Wyatt reports that W.W.Norton, which published The 9/11 Commission Report, will donate $600,000 (approximately 10% of gross proceeds from the book) to the following charities: the Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response and the International Center for Enterprise Preparedness, both at New York University, and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, of Johns Hopkins University.

I can't help but notice that the Nitze School is home to Professor Fouad Ajami, who, by the by, notoriously predicted that after the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam, the streets were "sure to erupt in joy." I can't imagine what kind of scholarship that kind of money is going to fund.

Journalist Permit Withdrawn

An Al-Jazeera journalist's permit has been withdrawn by the Moroccan government on charges of 'bias' in reporting news about Western Sahara. Despite impressive advances in freedom of speech in the last five years, the Sahara issue remains very touchy in the Kingdom. In fact, just recently, journalist Ali Lmrabet incurred the wrath of the authorities for a Sahara-related article. Lmrabet received the 2005 Hellman/Hammet Award, which is given out to "writers all around the world who have been victims of political persecution and are in financial need." Not the kind of award I want to see Moroccans listed for, ever.

Un-Stereotypical Profile

Very interesting commentary from William Dalrymple in the Guardian yesterday, in which he challenges the received profile of suicide bombers, and, in particular, the assumption that madrassas are breeding grounds for terrorists. While he concedes that Pakistani madrassas were instrumental in training the Taliban, he also argues that:

But it is now becoming very clear that producing cannon-fodder for the Taliban and graduating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaida terrorist who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the World Trade Centre. Indeed, there is an important and fundamental distinction to be made between most madrasa graduates - who tend to be pious villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds, possessing little technical sophistication - and the sort of middle-class, politically literate, global Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaida operations around the world. Most of these turn out to have secular scientific or technical backgrounds and very few actually turn out to be madrasa graduates.

The men who planned and carried out the Islamist attacks on America were confused, but highly educated, middle-class professionals. Mohammed Atta was a town planning expert; Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's chief of staff, is a paediatric surgeon; Omar Sheikh, the kidnapper of Daniel Pearl, is the product of the same British public school that produced the film-maker Peter Greenaway.

Peter Bergen of Johns Hopkins University recently published the conclusions of his in-depth study of 75 Islamist terrorists who had carried out four major anti-western attacks. According to Bergen, "53% of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52% of Americans have been to college." Against this background, the backgrounds of the British bombers should not come as a surprise.

That's an interesting hypothesis, but one that will be small comfort to Moroccans--all the bombers involved in the Casablanca attacks of two years ago were unemployed young men from a huge slum just outside the city. It could be that what Dalrymple is getting at is that the cadres in these terrorist cells are college-educated, and have the technical know-how, but the execution of the horrendous acts is left to the "cannon-fodder," as he calls them.

July 20, 2005

Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building

Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building comes to us sheathed in the kind of hype that is reserved for Da Vinci clones: the bestselling novel in the Arab world for two years running; the screen adaptation is the highest-budget Arabic-language movie ever made; the real-life residents of the Yacoubian have threatened lawsuits; and so on. It isn't the kind of book one would expect to see translated into English (Lord knows we have enough commercial fiction in the States). Which is why it's such an interesting book.

The ten-story building of the title, like its namesake in Cairo, was built in 1934 by an Armenian businessman. It's a beautifully designed building, we are told, with balconies "decorated with Greek faces," marble corridors, and a Schindler elevator. It became home to Cairo's rich and powerful when it opened. Things changed after the revolution, however, with the storage sheds on the rooftop being rented out to poor families--a sort of sky-high slum. The Yacoubian became the sort of place that housed both squatters and bigwigs.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the residents of the Yacoubian building in Alaa Al Aswany's novel are meant to represent different players in modern Egyptian society, from the old guard to the new. Zaki Bey El Dessouki, for instance, is an aristocrat and an incorrigible womanizer who is nostalgic for the days of King Farouq. He cannot abide what Nasser's revolution has done to Egypt, and he merely wants to live out his days in peace and comfort while seeking refuge in whiskey and the occasional bit of opium. His neighbor, Hagg Azam, is a self-made millionaire with political ambitions. He made money from a chain of clothing stores that cater to "modest women." Now the Hagg wants to run for a seat in the People's Assembly, not out of political ambition, but out of a desire to belong into the rarefied circles of the powerful, where real money is to be made. In other words, Hagg Azzam is the nouveau riche to Zaki Bey's aristocrat.

Then there's the young generation. Taha El Shazli, the doorkeeper's son, is a straight A student with loads of ambition, but when he applies for the Police Officer's Academy, his candidacy is dismissed with one question, "What does your father do?" His social class prevents him from getting ahead, and despite his entreaties to the highest level of government, he has to turn to Plan B: majoring in Political Science. At the university, he finds kinship with a group of religious students, and is soon taken in with their right-wing imam. Meanwhile, Taha's girlfriend, Busayna, the sole breadwinner for her family, struggles to make ends meet. She is sexually harassed at every job she gets and soon realizes that the only way she can make it is if she puts up with her bosses' advances. Egypt's young men are easy preys to religious extremism while the country's young women are victims of sexual exploitation.

In the world Al Aswany has devised, there are also elements of a multicultural society. The brothers Abaskharon and Malak are Coptic Christians who save every penny they make, by legal and illegal means, in order to finally afford a room on the roof. The Yacoubian is also home to Hatim Rasheed, a half-French gay intellectual and brilliant editor of Le Caire newspaper. Hatim has a fondness for Nubian men, those who remind him of his first homosexual experience, with one of his servants. All these characters are forced, at one point or another, to make choices that ultimately result in either their downfall or redemption. In at least one case, the outcome will be interpreted entirely differently depending on the political and social persuasions of the reader.

The Yacoubian Building is reminiscent of the large-scale melodramas so often produced by Egypt's huge film industry--young idealists, desirable ing�nues, old predators, and so on. The novel wallows in manipulative emotion: Countless scenes end in cliffhangers that are not resolved for another thirty pages. In fact, the writing style itself is reminiscent of the visual language of the movies. Each section is introduced with a paragraph or two of exposition, a sort of establishing shot for the action that is about to unfold. The narrator in these introductory sections is omniscient, and he is given to sweeping and rather infuriating generalizations. He tells us, for instance, that women "all love sex enormously," that miscegenation produces children who are "confused," that the faces of homosexuals are marked by "miserable, unpleasant, mysterious, gloomy, look[s]," that gays, "like burglars, pickpockets, and all other groups outside the law" have developed a secret language of their own, and so on. Such pronouncements make it difficult to inhabit the world of the characters and to experience their lives in the way one expects from a novel.

Still, Al Aswany manages to mine his material for satirical purposes. For instance, God is invoked countless times, both by the righteous and by the corrupt. In a particularly humorous scene, a group of government officials who are discussing the price for a bribe to fix upcoming elections repeatedly call on God to bless them. They even conclude the agreement by reading the Fatiha (the first Sura of the Qur'an). Similarly, the Prophet's hadith are cited both to encourage patience and to justify preventing a young man from having an education. Al Aswany also does a good job of portraying the tough choices faced by Egyptian youth in the face of a corrupt, repressive regime: Join the (Islamic) opposition or leave the country and go work elsewhere, never to return. It is in his commentary on Egyptian politics that Al-Aswany (a frequent contributor to local newspapers) really hits his stride.

The Yacoubian Building is an ambitious novel, but ultimately a flawed one. As a portrait of a country in crisis, however, it is a worthwhile read.

Dissidence Police

In a guest column at Mobylives, Renata Dumitrascu questions Ismail Kadare's right to call himself a dissident.

In accepting this year's Man Booker International Prize, Albanian writer Ismail Kadare criticized people from ex–communist countries who claim they were not allowed to be writers by the repressive system. He contemptuously declared "The people entitled to speak about that period are the people who did something and not the people who kept silent and have retrospective nostalgia."
There is a lot of similarity between Kadare's rhetoric and that of other self–styled "dissident" writers from the communist period in Eastern European countries: a need to cast themselves into false roles of national anti–totalitarian heroes, when in fact, most of them led lives of privilege during the worst repression and continue to do so.

Michael Orthofer, of the Complete Review, disagrees:

These words [as quoted by Dumitrascu] are not -- as implied -- from the speech he made accepting the prize, but rather from comments made to the press (see, for example, this report) -- and they don't appear to target actual silenced writers, but rather poseurs.

Orthofer concedes that Kadare sounded a bit full of himself on accepting the International Man Booker Prize, but he says:

His insistence on a focus on literature rather than politics is obviously the only way for him to go (given his all-too-regime-friendly behaviour and privileged status). Given the alternatives -- exile or silence (imposed, one way or another, by the all-powerful regime) -- the path Kadare chose doesn't seem the worst alternative. Sure, he's not a poster-child for opposition to a horrible wrong, but as far as fellow-travelling goes, there's an argument to be made that his form was justifiable.

Return To The Homeland

As of July 13, more than 500,000 Moroccans have returned to the kingdom for annual vacation from their places of residence in Europe. I wouldn't want to be working the freeway toll booth, man.

"Undigested Psychodrama"

Over at Slate, April Bernard doesn't spare the latest John Irving:

Incest, mutilation, orphans, wrestling, prose only a mother could love—yes, it's another John Irving novel. And Until I Find You—full of the author's characteristic storytelling drive, macabre imagination, and lumpy sentences—arrives with an added frisson: the pre-publication announcement of its autobiographical roots. Jack, the hero, is sexually handled and molested by older girls and women by the age of 10; he longs for a father who left before he was born; he joins the wrestling team at a New England prep school; his eventual fame is compromised by a sense of vacancy and abandonment and a search for sexual and personal security that eludes him. These basics will be familiar to readers of Irving's earlier novels, so it is not surprising—though it is clearly meant to be titillating—to learn they are autobiographical in origin. In fact, one suspects that the PR release of this "confession" (and the news that, while he was writing the book, Irving did at last find out who his father was) is designed to forestall the criticism such a dreadful, though clearly heartfelt, mess like this deserves.

July 19, 2005

Nick Arvin Recommends

"Wright Morris published more than thirty books and won a National Book Award before he died in 1998, yet his work was never widely read and now seems--alas--in danger of slipping entirely from sight. The Works of Love was my introduction to Morris, and it remains my favorite among his novels," Arvin says. "It is a strange novel, although strange in a manner that is not currently in fashion. Its protagonist, Will Brady, is a Midwesterner, gentle, quiet. He is lonely, but has little bitterness. The book has almost no plot--which usually I cannot bear in fiction, but in Morris's beautiful, descriptive prose, as the novel drifts on the intense but curiously disengaged observations of Brady, it attains a unique power. Brady rarely knows quite what to make of the world around him or how to react to it, which has a tragic aspect, but it is also unexpectedly liberating, and it allows the novel to explore that extraordinary emotion--difficult to write about and often neglected in fiction--called wonder."

Nick Arvin is the author of a collection of stories, In the Electric Eden, and a novel, Articles of War, which was published in February.




If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

July 18, 2005

On Reviews

Over at the Guardian, Robert McCrum wonders whether book reviews matter. He asks the question mostly from the point of view of authors: should they bother reading their reviews? And then trots out a few anecdotes.

No Place Safe From Harry

Morocco Times: 10 Questions For JK Rowling.

Ad Content

The WSJ's Vauhini Vara reports on publishers' attempts to create fake websites and blogs to promote novels.

A Poet Silenced

Abdallah Al-Ryami, an Omani poet and playwright, was jailed last week for "criticizing human rights violations" in his country. Reporters Sans Frontieres has a little background on the case.

Eggers Circus

A longish profile of Dave Eggers appears in the FT this weekend, and I only link to it because it contains a few amusing, semi-sarcastic observations, like this one:

He is part of that American tradition where being a successful author isn’t quite enough. You have to be a whole home entertainment system.

Read on.

Botero's Cri de Coeur

An exhibit of Botero's paintings, inspired by the torture of Iraqi prisoner by U.S. troops at the Abu-Ghraib prison, opened in Rome last month. Another show of the artist's works opened in Barranquilla, this time displaying pieces inspired by car bombings and kidnappings in Colombia. The L.A. Times has a review of the shows, and of what drew Botero to the events.

These aren't the sorts of scenes most people associate with Fernando Botero. For decades, the 73-year-old Colombian painter and sculptor has been best known for his seemingly innocuous images of plump priests, chunky children and still lifes of gargantuan fruits and flowers.

But this perception of Botero's work was always overly simplistic and incomplete. Encoded, or perhaps hidden in plain sight, in many of his paintings are multilayered cultural symbols, covert allusions to current events and winking art-historical references to works by Velázquez, Vermeer and other Old Masters. Some of his most enigmatic images — birds perched in lollipop trees, faces anxiously peering out of windows, a pile of dead bishops resting peacefully — hint at darker forces roiling beneath the colorful, pleasing surfaces.

Read more here.

Religion of Peace and Violence

One of the (many) things that enrage me about the portrayal of Islam in the mainstream media is that it's treated either as a revolting pathology that needs to be eradicated, or as a retrograde faith that is completely different from other religions. Right-wing pundits bleat about "Islamo-fascism" while some conservatives and quite a few liberals stress that Islam is a religion of peace. Both of these observations are one-sided. Islam, like Christianity before it, has been used both for peace and for war. It's been used to justify utter good as well as pure evil.

So it was refreshing to see this point picked up by Jason Burke in a weekend Op-Ed in the Observer. "We need to be clear," he says "that, like any faith, Islam is a religion of peace - and sometimes of violence." Unfortunately, he doesn't put the fundamentalists currently running the White House to the same thorough examination.

Tech Help

I noticed a sizeable surge in my stats file of referrals from casino ads, online gaming, viagra pills, and other spammers. Does anyone know how I can block these, or at least stop them from cluttering my stats file? Please email me if you have suggestions.

July 15, 2005

What I'm Reading

Of the books I read, I review very few on my blog, so since it's a Friday and I'm procrastinating, I thought I'd post a little bit about what I've read lately.

I just finished Nedjma's The Almond, which I thought was bloody awful. It had almost no character development, and the plot was fairly uninspired. The erotic part was well-written, though, if you're into that sort of thing, but even that sank into problems of its own.

I did, however, enjoy War by Candlelight, Daniel Alarcon's debut collection, which is set mostly in and around Lima. In his writing, the city is treated as a character and I thought that was beautifully done.

I'm nearly finished with Alaa Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building. It's set during the Gulf war, and it features a wide range of characters who all inhabit the same art-deco building in Cairo. It's a light, fun read, with occasional eyebrow-raising comments (about women, sex, and gays) that are left to the reader to interpret. I'll probably have more to say about it in a couple of weeks.

I just started Kevin Smokler's anthology Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, which features essays by Adam Johnson, Meghan Daum, Tom Bissell, and Nell Freudenberger, among others. Smokler was in Portland yesterday for a reading, and he shared some thought-provoking observations about books and the state of reading today.

I know I've mentioned this book before several times, and I will mention it again: I loved Abdulrazak Gurnah's Desertion, which is set in 1899 in Zanzibar, and tracks the consequences of a forbidden love affair across three generations. I found it beautifully written, incredibly compelling, and profoundly relevant. It comes out this month, and I really urge you to read it.

Hemon on Srebenica

Aleksandar Hemon contributes a wonderful piece to the WSJ about the massacre at Srebenica ten years ago and the aftermath of the genocide of Bosnian Muslims. I hesitate to excerpt any part of it--it's such a thoughtful, beautifully written piece that I think it should be read in its entirety--but here's the beginning:

A couple years ago, at a Bosnian event in Chicago, someone pointed out to me a mother from Srebrenica. She was on her way to Washington to talk about the massacre to members of Congress. She had lost, the person told me, about a hundred male members of her immediate and extended family. She was surrounded by other Bosnians, talking and listening to them, but she seemed to exist in a different realm, her serene, sad face marked by an experience most of us could not begin to understand. I did not dare approach her, for I had spent the war safe in Chicago. What could I have said to her? What can be said? Please accept my condolences? Never again? Had I found myself face to face with her, I would have probably stood silent, for the enormity of her loss is beyond my imagination, therefore beyond the reach of my language. I would have probably been embarrassed by the triteness of what I perceived as my "problems" (taxes, an ankle injury, marital discord, etc.). I would have also been ashamed of my human, individual helplessness in July 1995, and thereafter, and always. I regret I had no courage to hug her, but even if I did I would have been humbled by the physicality of my body, both of us reminded at that moment that her men had perished, and I was arbitrarily alive.

Hemon is the author, most recently, of Nowhere Man.

Thanks to Sean M. for the link.

Opus

A few weeks ago, a friend emailed me to tell me that Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits was listed on Amazon. "Already?" I thought. A few days later, the book showed up on Powell's and then on B&N, leading to unavoidable comparisons--questions like "Why does Powell's display the book cover but not Amazon?" or "Why does Amazon carry a bio but not B&N?" or "Why do they all show different on-sale dates?" and so on.

Oh, and there's the scrutiny to which I subject Amazon's customers-who-viewed-this-book-also-viewed feature, trying to figure out what kind of literary taste my prospective readers have. And then there's the sales rank--a device that seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of giving writers sleepless nights. One day, my book was hovering around the 100,000 rank (respectable) the next day it drops to 500,000 (what happened? was it something I said?).

All silly questions, really, since there's still a couple of months to go before the book is released and none of this matters one bit. Besides, don't I have a novel to write and shouldn't I be worrying about that instead? I should, really, I should.

Off Friday

The one and only Randa Jarrar is in Connecticut this week visiting her family so I'm going to be around here today. I'll be catching up on some old posts I've been meaning to write, so stay tuned.

July 14, 2005

Almond Attention

Lord helps us. Another review of The Almond, and another reviewer who doesn't get it. Here's an example:

Nedjma writes in painstaking - and often painful - detail about Islamic customs regarding marriage and sexual practices. "No, I didn't love Hmed, but I did think he'd be of use to me, at least - he'd make a woman of me. Free me and cover me with gold and kisses," Badra says of her husband. Then: "All he managed to do was deprive me of my laughter."

The book tells the story of one woman from Imchouk, one woman who goes to Tangier and takes a lover. How the hell do you go from that to "Islamic customs"? What the hell are Islamic customs anyway? Bosnian? Malaysian? Chinese? French? What?

On The Radio

Well this should be interesting. Mark Sarvas, who's been doing the L.A. Times Book Review Thumbnail on his blog, The Elegant Variation, will be on an open source radio show with Steve Wasserman, outgoing editor of the review. Kevin Smokler will also be a guest, so it should make for a very interesting show. You can stream it live here at 4 pm Pacific time.

Or you can listen to Bookworm on KCRW, where Michael Silverblatt will be hosting a show on Asian identity in writing, with guests Don Lee, Susan Choi, and Maxine Hong Kingston. You can stream it live here at 2:30 pm Pacific time.

Department of WTF

Chinese writer Hu Wenliang claims he spent a year writing a novel composed of only punctuation marks. The entire text of the 'novel' is this:

：？

：！

“‘……’”

（、）·《，》

；——

Wenliang says that it tells a "touching love story" and promises a reward of nearly $17,000 to whoever can decode it. Taking elitism to new heights, no?

Crispin on Crispin

Over at the Book Standard, Jessa Crispin writes about what she's missing out on: literature in translation.

Recently I noticed just how much I was missing out on when I saw how many works by Julio Cortázar (1914–84), one of my favorite writers, have not been translated into English. Archipelago recently released the first English translation, by Anne McLean, of The Diary of Andres Fava. I was so impressed by the novella that I wanted to get in contact with McLean to talk about the work of translation and the books of the masterful Belgian-born Argentine who is so well-known by Spanish and Latin American readers, but virtually invisible to English-speaking ones.

As a child, I read in Arabic and French (both in the original or from other languages translated into the Arabic or the French) and that state of affairs seemed completely normal to me. When I came to the States, I was surprised to find out how little of world literature people seemed to read. And things aren't improving, with literature in translation being constantly curtailed to make room for the Da Vinci Codes and Harry Potters.

Darwish to Militants: Leave Us Alone

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish lashes out at militants who have taken to disrupting cultural events, the SF Chronicle reports:

It's been a hot summer on the Palestinian arts scene: gunmen broke up the concert of a popular West Bank singer after he refused to limit his repertoire to political songs, and a Hamas-run town banned a music festival to prevent mingling of the sexes.

Now, Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish is striking back, saying fanatics have no right to deprive Palestinians of beauty in their lives. "There are Taliban-type elements in our society, and this is a very dangerous sign," Darwish told a gathering of artists and intellectuals this week.

It's not just an argument over artistic freedom, but over whether a future Palestinian state will be a theocracy or a pluralistic democracy.

Read the rest here.

July 13, 2005

Readings Around Town

Busy week, kids. Tonight at Powell's, Natasha Radojcic reads from You Don't Have To Live Here, her novel about a young woman's travels and search for redemption. (Details here.) Last year, Radojcic's essay about her first few months in America had me nodding with amusement and recognition.

And then on Wednesday, Kevin Smokler will be in town to promote Bookmark Now, his anthology of essays about reading and writing in an age when both seem increasingly embattled. (Details here.) A couple of months ago, Smokler guest-blogged over at The Elegant Variation, and got some notice from discerning readers.

I'll be attending both those events, so stop by and say hi.

Guest Review: Mary Akers

Bitter Milk
John McManus
Picador
208 pp.

John McManus' startling debut novel Bitter Milk tells the emotional coming-of-age story of nine-year-old Loren Garland. Loren is an awkward, overweight, fatherless child growing up haphazardly in the mountains of Tennessee with a mother who is acutely unhappy in her female skin.

Loren's story comes to us through the voice of Luther, a young boy who is by turns presented as Loren's imaginary friend, his evil alter ego, and even a twin who died at birth but retains a sort of omniscient dominion over his surviving sibling. Luther-as-narrator speaks directly to the reader, as well as maintaining the abili