November 30, 2005
For Your Consideration
Over at the Nation, Katha Pollitt has put together a list of worthwhile charities, at home and abroad, for you to consider. She explains each charity's work, and why your money is needed. Hop on over there.
Meta for the Lit Crowd
Bud Parr (of Chekhov's Mistress) has just launched a lit blog aggregation service called Metaxucafe. I gave up trying to figure out how to pronounce it, but I'm already reading it.
Interfaith Clubs
Have you noticed how someone will mention something to you--a movie, a book, a song, an event--and then the very same day you'll notice an item about it in the newspaper? I was just talking to a friend about the Daughters of Abraham, and then I saw this article in the CSM about them. It's a four-year old book club that brings together Jewish, Christian and Muslim women. It now has eighteen members.
November 29, 2005
Scott Turow Recommends
"I'll recommend two books," Turow writes via email. "Frances Sherwood's The Book of Splendors, a fantasy about the golem of Prague, published a few years back to almost no notice, and Scott Simon's Pretty Birds, which is a magnificent novel about the Bosnian war from the point of view of a 16 year old female sniper. It's a significant book which didn't get its full due."
Scott Turow is a writer and attorney. He is the author of seven best-selling novels, including his first, Presumed Innocent and his most recent novel, Ordinary Heroes published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in November, 2005.
If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
Danticat & Díaz @ Lannan
The latest installment of the Lannan Foundation's Readings and Conversations series features Edwidge Danticat with Junot Díaz this Wednesday, November 30, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Details here.
Longtime readers of this blog know that I'm a huge fan of both Danticat and Díaz's work. If any of you are able to attend, do please write in and tell us how it was.
Bad Sex Award 2005
Nominees for the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award were announced on Friday. Among the finalists: John Updike and Paul Theroux. You can read the terrible extracts over at the Guardian.
Riot News
Would any of you kind souls out there happen to have a subscription to the New York Review of Books? I see that the December 15 issue has an essay by William Pfaff on the riots in France, which starts thus:
The rioting in France's ghetto suburbs is a phenomenon of futility—but a revelation nonetheless. It has no ideology and no purpose other than to make a statement of distress and anger. It is beyond politics. It broke out spontaneously and spread in the same way, communicated by televised example, ratified by the huge attention it won from the press and television and the politicians, none of whom had any idea what to do.
In other riot news, did you know that the 9,000 burned cars, the violence and mayhem, the arrests, it was all because of rap music?
Bearing Witness at Gitmo
Also in the New York Review of Books, but this one's freely available: Joseph Lelyveld's review of Captain James Yee's For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire. Yee was the Muslim chaplain assigned to the naval prison at Guantanamo Bay. Last year, he was accused of being a spy for Al Qaeda, and then later cleared of all charges. The review offers a revolting account of what life is like in America's shameful prison.
Bookcast 1:3
The latest installment of Powell's Bookcast features Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith, Uzodinma Iweala, and local boy Marc Acito.
November 28, 2005
Writers Pick Their Favorite Books
The Guardian asked forty-three poets and writers (among whom: Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie, John Banville, AS Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Chuck Palahniuk, Zadie Smith, Tariq Ali, and Helen Oyeyemi) to select their favorite books of 2005. A worthwhile read.
HODP in Detroit, Ventura
Kathryn Masterson's Chicago Tribune review of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits has been reprinted in the Detroit Free Press and the Ventura County Star.
Department of WTF
The AP reports that 22 Emirati men have been arrested at a "mass homosexual wedding" in the UAE. The men face jail time as well as government-mandated "hormone treatments."
Migrant Stories
As many as twenty-two people are feared dead in the latest immigration tragedy off the coast of southern Spain. I'm sure the response will be "let's build higher fences," like that's going to make any difference.
Cain and Abel in the Kitchen
Ron Charles's review of Thomas Christopher Greene's foodie novel I'll Never Be Long Gone is written like a recipe, but it also contains a moral:
It's galling that some authors, such as, say, Anita Shreve, must constantly defend themselves from the pejorative "romance" label no matter how well they write, while romantic fluff like this can pass itself off as "literary fiction." It's the same in the kitchen, of course: Women just cook, but men are chefs.Check, please.
Department of Corrections
From the Observer:
Our interview with American literary sensation Benjamin Kunkel (Review, last week) was accompanied by a panel of quotes from US reviews, supplied by his publisher. One, from Entertainment Weekly, read: 'Kunkel has succeeded in crafting a voice of singular originality' and omitted the next line ' - one you want to punch in the mouth.'Ouch.
In Brief
- Rodney Welch reviews Yiyun Li's debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, for the Washington Post, comparing it favorably to Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies.
- Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe has launched a website.
- Jordan Rosenfeld reviews Daniel Olivas' Devil Talk for Northern California's KQED.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
November 23, 2005
Thanksgiving 2005
It's a short week here at Moorishgirl. Aside from consuming gargantuan-sized meals, I plan on spending the next few days working on my novel. Have a happy Thanksgiving. I will see you back here on Monday, when I will have more lit news, cultural commentary, book reviews, recommendations, and giveaways.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Guest Review: Roy Kesey
The Dreams
Naguib Mahfouz
American University in Cairo Press
112pp.
Dreams are strange and wonderful things. Our own dreams, that is. Other people's dreams, of course, are just fucking irritating. "And so then this huge purple-and-green snake rose up out of the stick of butter! And the snake had the face of Tom Cruise! Except it wasn't Tom Cruise, it was my sister! And then the stick of butter turned into an M1 Abrams, and all of a sudden I'm on a battlefield, kind of like Vietnam except not exactly, more like Ecuador, maybe? Are there battlefields in Ecuador? Anyway, so then..."Which is why I got a little nervous when I read in Raymond Stock's translator's introduction to The Dreams that the mini-narratives in this, Mahfouz's latest book, are all based on dreams that Mahfouz himself actually had, and then developed into fiction. Cue the butter-snakes, I thought.
I needn't have worried. Mahfouz has written more books than most people have read, has shown time and again that he knows his way around the narrative block, and well and truly earned his 1988 Nobel on the strength of both his early historical work (most notably the Cairo trilogy--Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street) and his later, more allegorical and/or experimental work, including Miramar, The Journey of Ibn Fatouma and Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth.
In The Dreams, Mahfouz continues his explorative use of non-mimetic narrative strategies, and of its 104 short pieces--prose-poems, really--only a few fail on the score of overly dreamy, unresolved, unredeeming randomness. Which isn't to say that he knocks the rest of them out of the park. Some are allegories that come already uninterestingly unpacked: Egyptian society, for example, as a man bound and tortured, except that he is his own torturer, and ignorance--he says so himself--is his instrument of choice. Others feel vague and empty, while still others are overly personal, never escaping onto ground that readers outside the author's family and friends might be interested in mapping.
All of which makes this review sound like a pan, I know. But it isn't, not really. First, fourteen of the pieces, taken individually, are diamonds--big, fat, gorgeous, change-not-a-word diamonds that shine from every angle. Dream 5 in particular: a half-dozen Ph.D. theses could be strained from this half-page alone, its street that becomes a circus, the narrator's joy at the miracles of acrobats and trapeze artists, until the miraculous becomes repetitive, and then tense, and then terrifying. Can we give this guy another Nobel on the strength of these two hundred words? Seriously? Or a free car? Or something?
Second, we must add to those fourteen another ten that are brilliantly, hauntingly unconcluded but not inconclusive, plus fifty or so that are solid enough to make for good reading. And third--here comes the money shot--know that the whole is far greater than the sum. Put another, better way: the demons that rise up out of the fog to poke at us would obviously be far less effective if there were no fog out of which to rise, and Mahfouz, as both fog-machine and demon-wielder, sees to it that even the pieces which fail on an individual level come to help constitute the ever-thickening atmosphere of loss and confusion, paranoia and persecution, chaos and insufficiency, the fear of being judged unfairly and, still worse, the fear of being judged fairly.
Know too that this book does very nearly all necessary good work without demanding recourse to autobiographical detail, but, sucker for gossip that I am, I can't help pointing out that Mahfouz has earned every last shred of the fear and paranoia that appear in his dreams and Dreams. Thing is, this is the first book of his to appear since 1994, when at the age of eighty-two he was stabbed in the neck with a switchblade on orders from the blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abd al-Rahman because he, Mahfouz, refused to repent having written Children of the Alley, wherein, according to his critics, God and the prophets are unethically presented as fallible beings.
Stabbed in the neck! With a switchblade! On orders from a blind cleric! Because of the power of his fiction! Boy, some people have all the luck.
Roy Kesey lives in Beijing, and has published fictional and nonfictional objects in several places. Occasionally he talks to people. This is his first published book review, unless you count the pretend one.posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
November 22, 2005
Mitch Cullin Recommends
"One of my favorite modern works, Notes of a Desolate Man by Chu T'ien-Wen, perfectly captures the alienation and internal ruminations of many gay men; that it was written by a Taiwanese woman is no less remarkable, although Chu T'ien-Wen--acclaimed in her homeland as a novelist, intellectual, and screenwriter--has long been one of the best-kept literary secrets (at least in the West, surely due to so little of her work having been translated here). Free-flowing, non-narrative in the traditional sense, rich with metaphors and allusions, the narrator, Shao, reflects on, among other things, the death of a childhood friend from AIDS, Fellini, Levi-Strauss, and, ultimately, himself."
Mitch Cullin is the author of seven books including A Slight Trick of the Mind and The Cosmology of Bing. His novel Tideland is now a motion picture by Terry Gilliam. Besides writing, he continues to work on projects with his partner Peter I. Chang, among them a documentary about Hisao Shinagawa and the forthcoming Howe Gelb concert film This Band Has No Members.If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
In Brief
- The Seattle P.I.'s John Marshall has put together a list of books for holiday giving.
- Korash Huseyin, the editor of the Kashgar Literature Review, was sentenced by the Chinese government to three years' imprisonment for writing a political fable.
- Anne Marie O'Connor has a lengthy profile of Marjane Satrapi in the Los Angeles Times.
- The Lit Saloon computes the ratio of fiction to non-fiction book reviews in the NYTBR, and finds it wanting.
- Of Gabriel García Márquez's new novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Michiko Kakutani writes: "[It] is ballyhooed by its publishers as the first work of fiction by Gabriel García Márquez in 10 years. It turns out not to have been worth the wait."
- Syrian poet Adonis will visit Iran to give readings. He will travel with Venus Khoury-Ghata, his translator into French, and a fine poet in her own right.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
November 21, 2005
Crossroads
Over at The Head Heeb, Jonathan Edelstein has a very thoughtful post about Sharon's decision to quit Likud, and what it could mean for Israel, and for Palestine.
The formation of a centrist party will be the second step in the political realignment that began with Amir Peretz' victory in the Avoda primaries. Just as Avoda's passivity has been replaced by pro-peace and social-democratic activism, the Likud as we know it is coming to an end. Instead of being several parties in one, the Likud will once again be the party of the nationalist right. The next election will see a fairly clear choice between three parties, each representing a different approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Peretz' vision of a negotiated peace, the Sharon list for further unilateral withdrawals, and the Likud for maintenance of the status quo. The factions also seem ready to break down along economic lines into social democrats, populists and neoliberals, although the latter two will be represented on both the Sharon and Likud lists.
Read it all here.posted by Laila Lalami at 10:00 AM
No Offence
A controversial bill that was introduced in Britain last June would make it illegal to say or write anything that might offend people of any religion. The bill came under criticism because its vague wording would quite likely threaten free speech. In response, PEN has recently published a collection of essays, titled Free Expression is No Offence. You can read excerpts from the contributions by Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie in the Guardian. Here's a snippet from Monica Ali's contribution:
What's the problem here? I think there are many but I want to set them out in three broad areas. The first concerns the differences between race and religion as far as free speech is concerned. It is not in the faintest way plausible to vilify a particular race and to claim that no harm is intended towards members, individually or collectively, of that racial group.
Read it all here.Religions, on the other hand, are sets of ideas and beliefs. They should not be privileged over any other set of notions. I am not bound to respect the idea that I may be reincarnated as an insect or a donkey or that Jesus is the son of God or anything else that I regard as mumbo-jumbo. Indeed, if there are aspects and practices of a religion that conflict with my own notions and beliefs (of fairness and justice and so on) then the moral onus is on me to speak up against them. If I loathe the fact that Islam has been used to deny the right of women in Saudi Arabia to vote then I ought to say so.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Turning the Tide
Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my views on the novel and its relation to the world at large, so I quite appreciated Walter Mosley's essay in the Washington Post this weekend, in which he says of the writer's task:
The mastery of language is our duty. We enter this world by placing one word after another in comprehensible and unique ways. And then, of course, there's what the author is willing to talk about. When politics enters our writing, we are often asked by our representatives, our teachers, and sometimes our audience to step back from outspoken and controversial opinions about how this world works. Many times I've been told by people I respect, "There's too much emphasis on race in this book," or "The government and the police aren't really like that."
Read the rest of this excellent essay here.I am asked not to stand down but to stand back -- behind the line of good taste.
"Books are entertainments," I am told. "No one wants to hear your ideas about how the world works or what's wrong with America."
Of course they don't. The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink. If writing was always only a good adventure with a teary or cheery ending, books would not be worth the effort to read or to write.
Novels are about the world we live in. No one is suggesting that they should be propaganda for oil companies and fast food concerns. Or there to justify unjust wars or the American Way. Nor should they be apologies for anarchic maniacs who seek in their distress to destroy an entire world. But to the extent that these things are in our world, we should write about them.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
A Year Ago: The "Battle of Fallujah"
At the Guardian, Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana writes about what Fallujah was (and continues to be) like:
The photograph of an elderly Iraqi carrying the burned body of a child at Falluja, widely shown during the chemical weapons controversy of recent days, is almost a copy of an earlier one that Iraqis remember - from Halabja in March 1988. Both children were victims of chemical weapons: the first killed by a dictator who had no respect for democracy and human rights, the second by US troops, assisted by the British, carrying the colourful banner of those principles while sprinkling Iraqis with white phosphorus and depleted uranium.
I urge you to read the full article here.The Falluja image is emblematic of an unjust occupation. We read last week that US troops were "stunned by what they found" during a raid on a ministry of interior building: more than a hundred prisoners, many of whom "appeared to have been brutally beaten" and to be malnourished. There were also reports of dead bodies showing "signs of severe torture". Hussein Kamel, the deputy interior minister, was "stunned" too. This feigned surprise is a farce second only to the WMD lie. Torture has continued as under Saddam's regime in detention centres, prisons, camps and secret cells well beyond Abu Ghraib.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Calvino Day
Jonathan Lethem writes an appreciation of Italo Calvino for the NYTBR.
Calvino, it seemed to me, had managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic. Calvino, with his frequent references to comics and folktales and film, and his droll probing of contemporary scientific and philosophical theories, had encompassed motifs associated with brows both high and low in an internationally lucid style, one wholly his own.
More here.posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
HODP in the Richmond Times-Dispatch
Chris Wiegard reviews Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
This Just In: They Riot Because They're Polygamous
Have you heard the latest on the riots in France? Apparently, it's all because of polygamy. So say Nicolas Sarkozy, Bernard Accoyer, and even Hélène Carrère d'Encausse (further proof that being a member of the Académie does not preclude you from making utterly stupid statements.) Here she is, quoted in the Times:
Referring to the problem of African immigrants in France, she told Russian television in Moscow on Sunday, "Everyone is astonished: Why are African children in the streets and not at school? Why can't their parents buy an apartment? It's clear why. Many of these Africans, I tell you, are polygamous. In an apartment, there are three or four wives and 25 children."
All I can say is: The people of Utah better watch out. Rioters are coming.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
November 18, 2005
HODP on NPR
Alan Cheuse reviews Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits for NPR's All Things Considered. Click here to listen.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
HODP on KBOO
Tonight, sometime between 6 and 7pm, I'll be on KBOO discussing my book, the recent news in Morocco and France, and all my other pursuits.
If you're not in the Portland area you can listen online.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
HODP in BTW
A profile of me appears in the latest issue of Bookselling This Week. Enjoy.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
November 17, 2005
Thursday Giveaway: Waking Up American
Today's giveaway is Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally, an anthology of original work by women who immigrated to the United States during childhood, or were born to a foreign parent here. Here's how it works. Send me an email with the subject line "Waking Up American." Please include your street address. We here at Moorishgirl operate on a first-come, first-served basis. Good luck to all.
Update: Natasha T. from Maryland wins the book.
posted by Laila Lalami at 09:44 AM
Guest Column: Mandu Sen
I met Mandu Sen at a reading I gave in Boston earlier this month and we began corresponding shortly afterwards. She sent me this guest column about Amir Peretz, the Moroccan-born politician who's been making headlines in Israel of late:
The rioters in France were not the only people from North Africa to make the news recently.
Amir Peretz's election last week as the head of the dovish Israeli Labor party is a dramatic change in the Israeli political map. Or perhaps it is no change at all, but is yet another expression of the political chaos Israel has been in ever since the collapse of the Oslo agreements in 2000. It is hard to tell as of yet. He just won a vote among tens of thousands of voters. For his ascent to be a real and lasting change, he will have to win the vote of millions in a pending national election and create a functioning coalition in parliament (Most coalitions in Israel don't function. Not well, anyway.)
What is certain is that it is interesting, very interesting, and to those of us who care about such things, even very exciting. See, people like Amir Peretz aren't supposed to get so far in Israeli politics.
Amir Peretz was born to a Jewish family in 1953 in Bojad, Morocco. His family immigrated to Israel in 1957, part of a wave of immigration that brought hundreds of thousands of North African Jews to Israel. The Israeli government had a policy of sending new immigrants to temporary settlements in areas that they wanted to populate. Peretz's family was settled in such a place in the South of the country, away from the economic and cultural heart in Tel Aviv. Like many of his background, Peretz's father, who was a community leader back in Bojad, found employment only as a factory worker.
Today, many of these places might be called the Israeli answer to the French banlieue. They contain clusters of utilitarian housing projects that house the Jewish poor, whether second and third generation North Africans and newly come Russians and Ethiopians. Unemployment is high and opportunities to leave are few. That is where Amir Peretz started his political career, as the mayor of the town where he grew up. He became a rarity in the political scene; a dovish "Mizrahi", a Jew of Arab descent. He joined the Labor party, the political heir of the early Zionists from Europe who established Israel; but Labor was also widely identified as the party that the North African immigrants with extreme condescension and sometimes outright racism. In fact, that is arguably the main reason why so many Jews of Middle Eastern descent lean right rather than left.
So when Peretz won the election he challenged several perceptions. Most importantly, he might have changed the perception that Labor, the Peace party, could never win the votes of the Mizrahi Jews. Labor unexpectedly won the race to nominate the first 'black' candidate for the position of prime minister (many in Israel, both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, call non Ashkenazim 'black').
He also challenges the idea that Mizrahi Jews cannot be dovish. Israeli politics also tend to elevate ex-generals. One might fairly ask whether that was a good idea; after all, Israel isn't doing all that well right now. But the respect for the military still runs high, and there are those who claim that Peretz is disqualified because "he has never seen a bullet" (Not technically true- he actually reached rank of captain in the IDF).And what of the man himself?
Not much is known about him, even in Israel. He is supposed to be an extremely crafty politician, a populist, and a charismatic leader. He is for a free market economy, he says, but stresses that "the economy should serve the people", and not the other way around. Right now, it seems like his most compelling message. He is very much a dove, claiming he would speed up the negotiations with the Palestinians for a final settlement if elected. Some are advising him not to stress that point too much; he cannot afford to be seen as weak. But the Israeli public hasn't been exposed much to him, and his image is still evolving.
Overall, it seems that many people will react to him according to their own background.
For example, Peretz was very popular with the Palestinian citizens of Israel who voted in the Labor elections. And he seems to go out of his way to reach out to them, vowing to create a coalition with what is known as the Arab parties (composed purely out of Israelis of Palestinian descent).Then, of course, there are the critics. Many criticisms of Peretz are absolutely legitimate ("he panders to the big and powerful trade unions rather than to those who represent people who genuinely need help"), while other criticisms have more of a hint of snobbery, if not bigotry, in them ("His English is terrible", meaning, he's not sophisticated enough).
Labor today barely controls 20% of the Israeli Parliament. In its prime, the number was more like 50%. Amir Peretz faces an uphill battle. And even winning a national election, of course, is just the beginning of the battle, not the end. But he has won Labor over by being outspoken, relentless and possibly ruthless. Those of us who really want to see peace now just might dare to hope...
Mandu Sen grew up in Israel, received her undergraduate degree in the Humanities from Yale and is currently living in Boston and trying to be a pre-med student.posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
The Next Big Thing
Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation has been getting lots of buzz. The novel is about a precocious young boy who's conscripted to serve in the army of an unnamed African nation, to fight in its civil war.
Beast has received rave reviews in the Washington Post, the New Zealand Herald, and, today, in the New York Times. A friend emailed me the other day to say he'd really enjoyed it, which piqued my interest. I'll have to get through all this, first, though:
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Sampsell Appreciates Authors
Portland writer and small press publisher Kevin Sampsell has written a guest column on author appreciation over at Beatrice. I want a Sam Lipsyte pin.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Another Voice Silenced
Add Shi Tao to the long list of writers who are considered threats because of what they say:
The Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao will not be in New York on Tuesday November 22 to collect his Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Press Freedom Award - he is serving a 10-year prison sentence with forced labour in Chishan Prison, Yuanjiang City.
Read about it here.posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
National Book Awards 2005
The winners of the National Book Awards have been announced. Unsurprisingly, the non-fiction award went to Joan Didion's universally acclaimed The Year of Magical Thinking. In fiction, the winner was William T. Vollman for Europe Central. I bet Ed is happy with the choice.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Whitbread Shortlist
As has been widely reported, the Whitbread Prize shortlist has been announced. The finalists are Nick Hornby, for A Long Way Down; Salman Rushdie for Shalimar the Clown; Ali Smith for The Accidental; and Christopher Wilson for The Ballad of Lee Cotton.
The Guardian seems shocked that Salman Rushdie made the cut. I suppose it's become fashionable to knock him, but I really enjoyed Shalimar the Clown. With the exception of one or two missteps towards the end, I thought it was a far better book than much of what I've read this year.
By the way, the Whitbread also has a first novel category. The finalists for that are Tash Aw for The Harmony Silk Factory; Diana Evans for 26a; Peter Hobbs for The Short Day Dying; and Rachel Zadok for Gem Squash Tokoloshe.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Independence Day
This week, Morocco marked the fiftieth anniversary of its independence from France and Spain. The official ceremony commemorating the event was held at the Rabat Mausoleum, which is right next door to twelfth-century ruins from the era of Yacoub El Mansour.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
For Love of Coffee
My love for coffee is pretty well documented around these parts. I have a particular weakness for Cuban coffee, but was intrigued to learn about Canned Coffee. Check it out. Several writers have written reviews for them of various Japanese coffees (!).
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Moorish Pinky's Paperhaus: Part II
The second half of my adventures with Pinky is now online.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
November 16, 2005
Guest Review: Clifford Garstang
Devil Talk
Daniel A. Olivas
Bilingual Press
158 pp.What enchants the reader most in this fast-paced story collection is the element of surprise, the frequent juxtaposition of the realistic and the supernatural. There is a swirl of the fantastic with darkly-observed social commentary, of Latin American imagery and mythology with the gritty streets (and freeways) of L.A. It is not a stretch to associate the tone of these magical pieces with the stories of Gabriel García Márquez or Jorge Luis Borges.
As befits the title, the Devil makes frequent appearances. In the opening story, "Monk," a couple's cat is named Diablo, and the reader can't help wondering whether this feline Devil is somehow behind the central character's otherwise-unexplained rebelliousness and his unsettling dreams. In the title story, "Devil Talk," the Devil actually knocks politely on the front door, planning to make a deal with Jesus Zendejas, only to leave disappointed since Jesus (now Ysrael after his conversion to Judaism to please his Jewish wife) as a non-Christian is no longer eligible for Hell. The Devil takes a female form in "Don de la Cruz and the Devil of Malibu," a chilling story about class, and in "The Plumed Serpent of Los Angeles," where the displaced Aztec god Quetzalcoatl tries to seduce La Diabla in order to regain his throne. In all these stories we discover that it just doesn't pay to bargain with the Devil.
Even when the Devil is not named, though, evil appears in the world of the collection, in the form of child abuse, rape, racism-domination in all its various guises. "La Guaca," one of the shortest stories in the collection, is a dark parable about exploitation. An unnamed man (known to the villages as El Huérfano--The Orphan--because he has no family) runs the finest restaurant in the pueblo. It too has no name, but the villagers call it "La Guaca," which means "tomb" but also has the sense of "buried treasure." El Huérfano announces his intention to take a bride and invites the eligible women of the pueblo to dine at the restaurant. But there is a catch. Only the perfect woman will survive the feast's poisons to become his bride. And sure enough, one by one the women die until only the most beautiful woman remains. It seems they are meant to be together until he tastes his own deadly meal on her lips.
Where the stories are most successful, the supernatural elements are employed to reveal complete tales, some in the folk tradition, some that revolve around unexplained mysteries, some that turn on cultural conflict. On the other hand, the most satisfying and nuanced story of the collection is the least magical. Early in "A Melancholy Chime," a story told in reverse chronological order down to the inverted numbering of its sections, a professor suffers the consequences of an affair with a student, and from then on, moving backward in time, his multi-faceted character is revealed. The result is a vivid portrait of a man who is a flawed reflection of his past, rather than one who is merely explained by the presence of some mystical force.
If this magical collection has a weakness it would be that some of the stories feel fragmentary, as if they are the missing pieces to some other puzzle--polished and interesting, but in themselves not as compelling as the more developed stories are. In "Willie," for example, a pre-teen girl observes her possibly cross-dressing brother being berated by their father, a man who is clearly disappointed in his sonís behavior. This is a fascinating beginning, but the reader is left hanging as to where these characters might be headed. Similarly, in "Señor Sánchez," the title character may or may not have the ability to speak for the dead. In the end he disappears and the reader is unenlightened. It is one thing for a story to resonate, to leave the reader asking what will happen next, but if too little happens in the first place, too much is left to the reader's imagination.
But this is a minor complaint and only proves that Olivas has succeeded admirably in fabricating characters and circumstances that engage the reader to the point of wanting more. At its best, in stories like "A Melancholy Chime" and "Devil Talk," the collection shines magically.
Clifford Garstang lives near Staunton, Virginia and occasionally blogs at Perpetual Folly. His work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Eureka Literary Magazine, and North Dakota Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Baltimore Review and Shenandoah.posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
November 15, 2005
Jervey Tervalon Recommends
"Zoger Zalazny's Lord Of Light is a science fiction novel about a world run by a super-advanced human like race that has adopted all the attributes of the Hindu pantheon. They ruthlessly use their technology to oppress the lower castes, while taking god like privileges for themselves. Lord Kalkan, once one of the ruling elite, decides to teach Buddhism and to become a revolutionary. I suspect that Lord of Light is a homage/parody of Lord of the Rings, but it stands on its own as a wonderfully funny, thoughtful and beautifully written book. Though I don't write science fiction, this book meant the world to me when I discovered it in high school. I grew up in south central LA in the seventies and this book somehow made sense of the world for me and my pootbutt, nongangbanging friends. I just reread it and its still holds up as a call to speak truth to power."
Born in New Orleans and raised in Los Angeles, Jervey Tervalon is the author of five books including Understanding This for which he won the Quality Paper Book Club's New Voice's Award. He was the Remsen Bird Writer in Residence at Occidental college. His current novel is Lita and his current project, The Cocaine Chronicles was published in April, 2005. Currently he teaches at Occidental College, and the Center for African American Studies at UCLA.If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Up Next: House Demolitions?
This article, which appeared in yesterday's Le Monde, took my breath away. Here's a snippet:
Le député-maire UMP de Draveil (Essonne), Georges Tron, a annoncé, lundi 14 novembre, la suspension "immédiate" dans sa commune des aides sociales aux familles des fauteurs de troubles. Le ministre délégué à la famille, Philippe Bas, a, pour sa part, indiqué qu'une loi prévoyant une suspension des allocations familiales pour les parents qui n'exercent pas correctement leur fonction parentale était en cours "d'évaluation".
For the non-Francophone among you, let me translate. The mayor of Draveil has decided to immediately suspend any state allocation payments to the families of any youths caught rioting. In addition, a new law is under study that would similarly suspend family allocations to parents who do not "correctly exercise their parental functions."This clear violation of human rights is printed without further comment in Le Monde. Someone should send them this quote, from the Geneva Convention:
No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
France may not be at war, but when the state of emergency is invoked and curfews applied, it seems like the relevant document to go by. Imagine the outcry in this country if the government had decided to suspend welfare payments to the families of African-American kids rioting in Los Angeles in April 1992?posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
HODP in The Rocky Mountain News
A review of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits appears in the Rocky Mountain News. (No login required.)
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
HODP in Al Bayane
An interview of me appeared in Monday's edition of Moroccan newspaper Al-Bayane. (In French. No login required.)
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Hear, Hear
Last month, Ben Marcus published a 10,000-word essay titled "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction," in Harper's Magazine. Now Sherman Alexie has written a letter to the editor that quite rightly points out that:
Does Ben Marcus, educated at NYU and Brown, employed by Columbia, and published by Anchor, Vintage, and Harper’s, truly believe that he is an excluded experimentalist? Does he honestly believe that Jonathan Franzen, educated at Swarthmore, once employed by Harvard, and published by FSG and Harper’s, is somehow more elitist? Or is Franzen the populist? Or is a populist elitist? Is there really much difference between Marcus and Franzen? This East Coast - East Coast Literary Rap War reminds me of the Far Side cartoon in which a lone penguin, suffering in a crowd of millions of exactly similar penguins, rises and shouts, "I just have to be me!"
Very well put. On a related note, Jess Row recently wrote a piece in Slate in which he argued that:Sherman Alexie
Seattle, Wash.[Marcus] can't resist the urge to re-enact the great prizefights of the past--Kerouac vs. Capote, Barth vs. Gardner--as if what we really need, in 2005, is two white male writers fighting over something that can't be circumscribed, much less owned. Isn't it time we allowed the scorched-earth rhetoric of avant-gardes and ancien regimes to drift, like the tissue-thin sheets of an old aerogramme, into the dustbin of history?
Alexie text swiped from Maud Newton, via Tom Hopkins.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Zadie in Washington
The Washington Post has a longish profile of Zadie Smith. Yes, there is a mention of her cheekbones. My God, does it ever occur to these people that the woman is a writer?
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
Speaking of Zadie
Gautam Malkani, a British writer whose first novel sparked a bidding war when it was circulated among editors, has been dubbed the "new Zadie Smith." No word on what his cheekbones look like, but I'm sure they'll find something in his looks to comment on. The Zadie label was also applied to Diana Evans, another author making her debut. Says Anitha Sethi:
And yet, if I hear the term "the new Zadie/Monica" one more time I may be forced to kill myself by banging my head against the pavement of Brick Lane. It's something that young non-white authors are finding increasingly difficult to escape: the young half-Nigerian writer Diana Evans found herself tagged in the press as "the new Zadie" though her novel is an exploration of a twin sister's suicide. Since publishing has in recent years become more publicity-driven, the first question from the putative bookseller is: "What is the book comparable to?"
Apparently, no one thinks of asking: "Is it any good?"posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM
In Jordan
Neil MacFarquhar's report in the NY Times about the role of the secret police in Jordanian politics is both timely and thoughtful.
In Jordan and across the region, those seeking democratic reform say the central role of each country's secret police force, with its stealthy, octopuslike reach, is one of the biggest impediments. In the decades since World War II, as military leaders and monarchs smothered democratic life, the security agencies have become a law unto themselves.
MacFarquhar cites some very interesting statistics, e.g. the fact that more than three-quarters of Jordanians fear taking part in any political activity. In such a climate, how can there be any kind of alternative to the ideologies of right-wing religious lunatics, such as those that claimed the lives of 57 people last week in Amman?Last week's terror attacks in Amman accentuate one reason that even some Jordanians who consider themselves reformers justify the secret police's blanket presence - the fear that violence can spill across the border. But others argue that the mukhabarat would be more effective if it narrowed its scope to its original mandate of ensuring security.
posted by Laila Lalami at 12:00 AM