April 28, 2006

L.A. Times Festival of Books

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books takes place this weekend, which means that I will be closing up shop early this week in order to travel to California. The FOB is one of my favorite book fests--it's always singularly well organized, well attended, and has a great line up. You can view the event program here and the list of authors here. So many people, so little time! But I plan on somehow making it to all of Tod Goldberg's panels.

I will be doing a panel myself on Sunday; here are the details:

Sunday, April 30
10:00 AM
First Fiction: Finding a Voice
Mark Rozzo (moderator), Laila Lalami, Lisa Fugard, Adrienne Sharp and Marlon James
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
UCLA Campus

If you are in town for the fest, I also recommend you clear your schedule on Saturday night for Jim Ruland's Vermin on the Mount, which takes place at the Mountain Bar in Chinatown. This time, readers include: Cecil Castellucci, Ron Currie, Neale DeSousa, Ben Ehrenreich, Lisa Glatt, Alexis Orgera, Salvador Plascencia, and Steve Rinella. Until then, ciao.

Blog 'Fame'

Dan Wickett relates this amusing anecdote at his blog, the Emerging Writers' Network:

The three copies of Heti's Ticknor caught my eye, especially as a woman who I'd guess was in her early fifties was picking one up. She didn't glance at the blurbs, or skim the inside flap jacket - she just grabbed it like there was a line for them. I said, "Excuse me, do you mind if I ask you where you hear about that particualr book? Did you read her short story collection?"

Her response was "It's being discussed on the Litblog Co-op this week and it sounded good."

I smiled and said, "That's so cool that you're just grabbing a copy because of the LBC -I'm actually one of the members." I then extended my hand and said, "My name is Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network."

Read on.

Sunday Funnies

Alex Chun talks to a few comic artists about Sunday strips, and finds them pretty anxious about the future:

While strips such as "Boondocks" and "Over the Hedge" are making forays onto the small and large screen, respectively, the comics page is struggling to find its place in a post-"Calvin & Hobbes" world as its readership grows older and as its piece of newspaper real estate shrinks.

"I don't think you'll ever see another 'Calvin & Hobbes,' 'Bloom County' or 'Doonesbury' again," says Breathed, 48, who received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. "The popularity of those strips was built on a young audience — great comic strips are not built on the backs of aging readers."

Part of the problem, Breathed and other cartoonists say, is that newspapers, when choosing their comic strip lineup, put too much emphasis on the opinions of aging readers. As a result, stalwart strips such as "Peanuts," which continues to run as a reprint since the death of Charles M. Schulz in 2000, and "Blondie," which was created in 1930 by Chic Young, tend to remain entrenched on comics pages.

You can read the rest here.

April 27, 2006

Link Soup

I'm trying to get a few things finished (including Chapter 5) before I head out of town again, so there's not much up here today. A few links to tide you over till later in the day:

• John Barlow at Slate: "My failed fling with a book packager," or how he didn't end up accused of plagiarism.

• I read excerpts of Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah when they appeared in the Atlantic a few months ago, and they really irked me, for all the reasons that Evan Wright details in his Los Angeles Times review.

• I was very curious about Chris Abani's take on the new Wole Soyinka memoir. Here it is, in last Sunday's SF Chronicle. (Yes, it is another rave.)

• Film to character: How Capote explains Capote.
  

April 26, 2006

Misty Morning

This month, Los Angeles-based writer and photographer Ibarionex Perello sends in this lovely photo:

Of the picture, he says, "I was recently visiting friends near San Diego and we stayed at a hotel that had an adjoining golf course. I’m not a golfer, but when I saw the morning light coming through the mist, I walked out to the course and saw this pair of chairs. It was as if they were just waiting for me. It made getting up early on a weekend morning worthwhile."

Orange Shortlist

The shortlist for the 2006 Orange Prize has been announced: Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, Ali Smith's The Accidental, Carrie Tiffany's Everyman's Rules For Scientific Living, and Sarah Waters' The Night Watch made the cut.

Failbetter

The new issue of Failbetter is up, with contributions by Benjamin Krier, Colleen Mondor, and Portland author Kevin Sampsell, among others. There is also an interview with Anne Tyler. Check it out.

PEN World Voices Festival

The 2006 PEN World Voices Festival opened yesterday in New York, with dozens of readings and discussions on the bill. I'm looking forward to reading some of my friends' dispatches from the front lines. I did, however, want to highlight one event that might get lost in the shuffle:

Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby St.
Tickets: Free;
Call (212) 334-3324
Presented by The National Book Critics Circle

Writers read from Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl (winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction) to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the explosion of Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant. The readers include Philip Gourevitch, fiction writers Ken Kalfus, Julie Otsuka, Lynne Tillman, Martha Cooley, and Jim Shepard, along with poet Lawrence Joseph and translator Keith Gessen.

Related: Slate has a photo essay by Paul Fusco on the 20-year anniversary of the explosion.

RAWI Website

RAWI, the Arab American Writers' association, has launched its website. Find out more about members, read the newsletter, and check out opportunities and annoucements.

Nafisi Recommends

Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, recommends memoirs, novels, articles, websites, films, music, and art from and about Iran for the Washington Post.

April 25, 2006

Borderline

Hanif Kureishi reflects on how his play, Borderline, which was staged 25 years ago, might still be relevant for Asians in Britain. The play dealt with riots, fascism, and feminism, all of which are still around, though the context for them has changed.

During the 10 years between the Southall riots and the demonstration against The Satanic Verses, the community had become politicised by radical Islam, something that had been developing throughout the Muslim world since decolonisation. This version of Islam imposed an identity and solidarity on a besieged community. It came to mean rebellion, purity, integrity. But it was also a trap. Once this ideology had been adopted - and political conversations could only take place within its terms - it entailed numerous constraints, locking the community in, as well as divorcing it from possible sources of creativity: dissidence, criticism, sexuality. Its authoritarianism, stifling to those within, and appearing fascistic to those without, rejected the very liberalism the community required in order to flourish in the modern world. It was tragic: what had protected the community from racism and disintegration came to tyrannise it.

You can read the full essay here.

"Voix des banlieues"

Over at the Observer, Jason Burke catches up with Faïza Guène, the "voice of the suburbs." (What? You didn't know there was only one? Well, now you know.)

Guène's parents came from Algeria and her family - father a manual worker, mother who has never worked (As if, Ed.)- is very close. The fact that many readers, especially in France, jumped to the conclusion that the broken family of the novel is her own irritates her - 'I have written a novel, but I always end up being asked about social issues and so on.' It is part of the stereotyping that much of the book is devoted to combating.

Though not intellectuals, Guène's parents were 'deeply respectful' of books, she tells me. 'I learned to read when I was very young,' Guène says. But in Les Courtillières, the large, public-housing projects where Guène grew up and still lives, there were almost no cultural facilities at all. 'Books are expensive things. My book in its first edition cost €18. If I hadn't written it, I would not have bought it.'

Guène's first book is due out in the United States in June, under the title Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow (in an excellent translation by Sarah Adams, by the way.)

Díaz Interview

The SF Chronicle's Edward Guthmann interviews Junot Díaz, who was in town to support the staging of his short story, "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars," at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. Of course, the subject of that long-awaited second novel came up:

As a Latin American author, Diaz feels a mandate to give young Latinos, especially Dominican Americans, a voice and a touchstone to measure their experience. The problem, he freely admits, is the fact that he's an incredibly slow writer. "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" took a year. It's been 10 years since "Drown" was published, and the novel he's working on is in its fifth year of gestation.

Diaz sighs at the thought of his uncooperative work rhythms. "Who doesn't want to be constantly working?" he asks. "I drove myself nuts for a couple years, gave myself a lot of hassle." At the beginning of writing his novel, "I was a lot more deranged about it 'cause I didn't have the sense that I was ever going to find my way through it. Then I finally began to embrace my inner slowpoke.

If you read this blog consistently, you know how much I adore and admire Díaz, so go on over there and read the piece.

(Photo credit: Darryl Bush)

New Pearl Jam

Lorraine Ali meets profile of Eddie Vedder and his bandmates for Newsweek:

After the success of their 1991 debut, "Ten," which sold nearly 10 million copies, the Seattle group stopped making videos, shunned endorsements and shied away from almost all self-promotion. And each subsequent album proved less accessible than its predecessor. (Can you name the last two Pearl Jam records?)

Actually, no, I can't, and I live with a card-carrying Ten Club member. But I am indeed looking forward to the new CD. I hope it's good.

Viswanathan Watch

As has been widely reported, Harvard sophomore and New York Times bestselling author Kaavya Viswanathan is facing charges that she plagiarized material from Megan McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts for use in her novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life. (See the material side by side here.)

Over at Galleycat, Sarah points out that that there may have been more than one cook in the kitchen, what with the involvement of a "book packaging" company that helped Viswanathan make her work more "commercially viable." Meanwhile, Maud links to a MeFi thread in which a former teacher of Viswanathan states, "I was surprised to learn she had written a book, as her writing was awful -- I had given her low grades on her papers." And, over at Lit Saloon, Michael quips: "Wonderful stuff -- especially since the plagiarism seems so utterly pointless. God, we love the American publishing industry and what it leads to !"

Well, here is what it leads to: According to this article by Dinitia Smith in the Times, the "book packaging" company in question is 17th Street Productions, now renamed Alloy Entertainment. Smith writes that "Alloy, which referred questions to Little, Brown, holds the copyright to "Opal" with Ms. Viswanathan." (Emphasis mine.) So who exactly wrote this book?

RIP: Abdesslam Chraibi

Sad news this morning: Moroccan playwright Abdesslam Chraibi has passed on:

He started his career in theatre as an actor and playwright in the 60s in his native city, Marrakech, with the troupe Al Wifak and then with the national groupe Al Maamoura.

He later co-founded the troupe Al Wafaa al Marrakshia with other emblematic figures of the Moroccan theatre like Abdeljabbar Lawzir and Mohammed Belkas.

As a playwright, Chraibi is known for his successful plays “Al Harraz”, “Sidi Keddour El Alami”, and “Meksour Ljanah”, which discussed issues related to the Moroccan society, traditions, and culture.

The artist also wrote scripts for television, including the outstanding serial “Inssane fil Mizane”.

He collaborated with many theatre leaders, such as Tayeb Seddiki, and worked in Casablanca's municipal theatre.

He will be missed.

Ticknor discussion

This week, the LBC is engaged in a discussion of Sheila Heti's short novel Ticknor, which was nominated by MG pal Mark Sarvas. Of the book, Mark writes:

When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti, whose debut short story collection, The Middle Stories, was published in this country by McSweeney's, has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled.

As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject, a friendship that Heti has estranged from its factual moorings. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized — coveting his friend's wife, writing letters that never get answered, working on essays destined to be rejected — always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back.

I recommend you stop by the site to read LBC members' discussion.

April 24, 2006

Wordstock Wrap-Up

Because I'd missed last year's edition, I was really looking forward to Wordstock, Portland's book festival, which was held this weekend at the Oregon Convention Center. I got there around 10:30 am, and walked around, through the neatly ordered booths where booksellers, literary magazines, MFA programs, small presses, writers' conferences, writers' organizations, and self-published authors were selling their wares. I started my literary peregrinations by popping into the "Sassy Stories" reading, which featured Thisben Nissen, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Vendela Vida. The poster for the talk listed Vendela Vida as "the author of And Now You Can Go, and wife of author Dave Eggers." Seriously. What does her marriage have to do with anything?

Then I went into the green room to wait for my own panel, which was due to start at 12. The place was alternately desert-hot or freezing cold, but at least the coffee flowed and the company was great. I had a quiet chat with Mary McGarry Morris, who was delightfully down to earth. I caught up with David Hernandez and Lisa Glatt, and got a chance to congratulate her on landing a position at California State University. Local authors Cheryl Strayed, Justin Tussing, and Matt Briggs were also there, waiting to go to the Emerging Voices panel.

As we were both waiting for our International Fiction panel to be announced, Thrity Umrigar and I had an animated conversation about book reviewing, teaching, and writing. Thrity had reviewed my book for the Boston Globe (and, fortunately for me, she'd liked it.) The reading went well, and we had some great questions about how our books were received here in the U.S. as opposed to our native countries, whether we think of a specific audience while writing, and how we identify ourselves. Later, during the book signing, I was seated next to Nigerian author Chikodi Anunobi, whose work I was not familiar with, and so we talked about Nigerian literature for a little bit before Alex and I had to go look for some lunch.

As I was getting coffee, I bumped into Whitney Otto, who was holding an ice pack against the back of her head. "What happened?" I shrieked. She said she'd knocked her head somehow, but now she was feeling fine, and was looking forward to attending Karen Karbo's reading. I also had a discussion with Marc Acito about comedy writing--Acito himself is very funny, though he says he doesn't think he's being funny most of the time, he's just being candid; people find that amusing.

Unfortunately, I don't have pictures from my panel with Erin Ergenbright, during which we each read our contributions to The May Queen anthology . Alex, who had the camera, noticed that I was reading at the same time as Andrew Sean Greer. "Andy's reading!" he said. "See ya!" So here's Andy, answering questions about The Confessions of Max Tivoli. (No, I imagine him saying, that syndrome about reverse aging doesn't exist. I made it up.) I can't wait for his next book.

Let's see. What else happened? I watched Joyce Carol Oates come and go in the green room and on the festival floor, without mustering the nerve to talk to her. What do you say to someone like her? Hello, Ms. Oates, I love your work? What if she'd said, Take a number, sister.? Nor could I manage to talk to Colson Whitehead, whether before his talk or at the evening party. Again, I say, what can one ask? What do you use on your hair, Mr. Whitehead?

The larger stages, which were set up inside the convention floor, remained sparsely attended in the early hours of the day. (No doubt this is because the weather was lovely. This is Portland: When it's not raining, people go out.) But the turnout got bigger as the day wore on and as the stars came out. Edward Hirsch and Vern Rutsala packed the Mountain Writers Stage, for instance. There was a huge crowd at the "Writing About Iraq" panel, although, tellingly, not a single Iraqi was on the bill. But by far the most popular reading was Dave Eggers's. Here's a picture of him as he's about to go on the Powell's stage.

I skipped Sunday's events in favor of Chapter Five of my novel. But you can read more about Wordstock over at the Oregonian, where Jeff Baker delivers the goods, and don't forget to swing by the Powell's blog.

April 21, 2006

Wordstock Festival

Portland's Wordstock Festival is set to open today, with a guest list of more than 250 authors. For only $3 each day, you can attend dozens of readings at the Oregon Convention Center. (See the full schedule here.) The Willamette Week's editorial staff have also written up a handy little Guide to Wordstock, which you should check out.

I will be doing two events at Wordstock. I'll be reading from my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, at the International Fiction stage, with Thrity Umrigar, author of The Space Between Us. Here are the details:

Saturday, April 22
12 PM
Portland Stage, B110-111

And I will also be reading from a personal essay I contributed to the anthology The May Queen. The other reader is the lovely and amazing Erin Ergenbright, author of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook (with Thisbe Nissen) and the co-director of the Loggernaut reading series. Details:

Saturday, April 22
3 PM
Oregon Stage, B118-119

You can see the full author list here. It's an awesome line-up, so if you're in the Portland area, please come.

April 20, 2006

Thursday Giveaway: Come Together, Fall Apart

I met Cristina Henriquez at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference last year, and we've been in touch since. Having read a couple of her stories, I was eagerly awaiting the release of her first collection, Come Together, Fall Apart. (Henriquez is now on the road, promoting the book; you should try and make it to one of her readings. ) This week, I'd like to give away a copy of this lovely collection, to the first reader who correctly answers this question: What is the title of the novella included in this debut? Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Amanda R. from Cookeville, Tennessee.

Photo Report: 'Proud To Be Liberal'

Well, it turned out that quite a few people are proud to call themselves 'liberals,' as you can see from yesterday's reading with Thom Hartmann at Powell's:

You can purchase Proud To Be Liberal here.

Le Journal Hebdo Loses Appeal

The appeals court in Rabat upheld a judgment against independent newsmagazine Le Journal Hebdo in the libel lawsuit brought against it by the Belgian think tank ESISC:

[The think tank's] study said the United Nations should drop efforts to hold an independence referendum for Western Sahara, a mineral-rich former Spanish territory seized by Morocco in 1974. The rebel Polisario Front waged a long desert war seeking to end the annexation and gain independence.

The magazine said in December that the findings were so similar to official Morocco's views that it raised questions about whether the study was "guided by" and possibly paid for by the Moroccan government.

The punitive damages against the weekly's publisher, Aboubakr Jamai, and writer Fahd Iraqi were the biggest ever given journalists in Morocco, leading rights groups to question whether the courts were trying to curb media from taking independent stances on important matters.

"With this disproportionate sentence ... the judges are clearly trying to silence the journal," Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

The group said the magazine wasn't allowed to mount a proper defense. During the trial, the judge barred Le Journal Hebdomadaire from introducing an expert witness, prompting the magazine to withdraw from the proceedings in protest.

Read it all here And weep.

FTW Award Honoree Shows Up To Accept Honor

Novelist Rashim Esenov from Turkmenistan became the first writer to accept PEN's Freedom To Write Award in person, at a gala event. (Because of the nature of the award, the recipients are usually in prison, or not able to travel to New York.) Apparently, Esenov's 'offence' was:

According to PEN, he was arrested two years ago when he returned to Turkmenistan from a trip to Moscow with 800 copies of his banned trilogy, "Ventsenosny Skitalets" ("The Crowned Wanderer"), about a 16th-century Turkmen poet and general, Bayram Khan, who is said to have saved the Mogul empire from breaking apart.

Mr. Esenov was accused of smuggling the books and with inciting national and religious hatred. Although he was released from prison a few weeks after his arrest, he was forbidden to leave Turkmenistan, even to seek medical treatment in Moscow. Many of his books were burned.

After leaving New York, Esenov is due to go to Moscow for medical treatment, and then he "expects to return to his homeland after that. It is unclear what his status will be then."

PEN New England Event

Michael Lowenthal writes in about an interesting Pen event, Writing and Expression in Wartime. Writers Rebecca Faery, James Caroll, Nathaniel Fick, and Uzodinma Iweala discuss questions posed for writers in wartime.

This all takes place tonight, Thursday, April 20th at 7:00 pm at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

April 19, 2006

Portland Reading: Proud To Be Liberal

Tonight I'll be reading with Thom Hartmann, to promote the anthology Proud to be Liberal . Here are the details:

7:30 PM
Powell's City of Books
1005 W Burnside
Portland, Oregon

See you there!

Guest Review: Colleen Mondor

Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians
By Garth Cartwright
Serpent's Tail
309 pp.

Garth Cartwright was already familiar with Gypsy music when he decided to travel across the Balkans in search of the truth behind Gypsy myths. He set out to not only interview well-known Gypsy singers and musicians but also to explore how the Roma people were surviving in the former Yugoslavia and other Eastern European countries. (The term "Roma" refers to people of an established ethnic group and is slowly coming back into use. "Gypsy" was a title conferred by Europeans on the first Roma to arrive in Europe a thousand years ago as they mistakenly believed them to have arrived from Egypt. It is now used somewhat negatively to refer to anyone who leads a nomadic life, regardless of ethnicity, but is still the accepted term for Roma music.) While it may sometimes be difficult for some readers to keep track of the many unfamiliar names and destinations that Cartwright rattles off with ease, his intense desire to know just what life is like on the ground for a people struggling not only to hold on to their traditions but also to keep a roof over their heads makes his book, Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians fascinating reading.

In traveling through Serbia, Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria, Cartwright found most Romas living in "mahalas" or Roma settlements. The poverty is staggering, with the musicians often proving to be the only community members who are able to afford indoor plumbing or electricity. This is the story that, as Cartwright explains, is all too often ignored by journalists investigating post-war Yugoslavia or the collapse of communism. As he writes in the book, "their role in history is reduced to a silent supporting cast. And the Roma know this - nobody's listening - so [it's] feeding a sense of exclusion." This feeling is supported by the fact that few historians acknowledge the Roma genocide in WWII, where they were one of the few groups specifically targeted by Hitler for extermination and lost approximately 500,000 people in concentration camps. Cartwright makes a serious effort toward combating this lack of information by discussing Roma history in each of the countries he visits, explaining how they initially came to live there and their political and social struggles to gain equality. His research reveals that it has not been an easy road for them, and each step of the way their struggle has been gone largely unrecognized.

It is almost incomprehensible that in the midst of so much poverty and sorrow Gypsy music would not only thrive but gain in popularity across Europe. But Cartwright easily finds successful singers and musicians as he travels and interviews long time traditional singers like Esma Teodosievska and the new wave of stars like Jony Iliev and the genre defying Azis. He finds Gypsy music in clubs and bars, at music festivals and packed stadiums. Every chance he gets, he asks the hard questions, presses for answers about the price of success, dreams for the future and hopes for political and social acceptance. In the end he learns a vast amount about the Roma people and with Princes Amongst Men has certainly written a deep and valuable record of the modern Roma culture. But I am not sure that he ever really knows the people he talks to, or understands anything beyond the obvious about their struggles. At the end of the day after all, Cartwright can go home to Britain; he can leave the mahalas behind. The one thing the Roma make clear is that none of them have that option; no matter how loud they sing or how well they play they still remain an overlooked minority in Europe who suffer daily from racism and prejudice. It is that image and not the music that will linger with readers and make them wonder why we all know so many Gypsy myths but precious little Roma truths.

Colleen Mondor writes for Bookslut and Eclectica Magazine. She grew up in Florida, spent ten years in Alaska and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her book on Alaska flying is making the agent rounds and she has an essay in Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans, which was published by Chin Music Press in February 2006.

Ferhati Win

Jilali Ferhati's Mémoire en Detention ('Memory In Detention') has won first prize in the African Film Festival in Rome.

Baingana Profile

The Monitor has a profile of Doreen Baingana, who was in Kampala for the launch of her collection of short stories in Uganda. If you haven't read her book, Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe, you should.

The European Street

The Guardian reports that a Moroccan mosque in Ceuta was burned down, one of apparently several incidents of this nature on Spanish territory:

El País newspaper yesterday listed a number of mosques and other Muslim targets that have been ransacked, burned or had copies of the Qur'an set alight by intruders.

Police said that extreme rightwingers and skinhead groups were responsible for almost all the attacks.

"They want Spain to have the same sort of violent reaction that the Netherlands had after the murder of film director Theo van Gogh," one police expert told El País. "Little by little they are creating an atmosphere for this to grow."

Spain's 800,000 Muslims, many of them immigrants from neighbouring Morocco, have some 600 mosques around the country.

If you think that violence against Moroccans or their institutions are isolated occurrences in Europe, then you probably should make yourself watch this, courtesy of the Italian carabinieri.

Department of WTF

Well, color me surprised: The BBC reports that when George Clooney's Syriana was screened in the UAE, two minutes of film were removed by government censors: They dealt with mistreatment of Asian workers in an unnamed Gulf country.

April 18, 2006

Londonstani Hype Machine Revs Up

In the Times, Zoe Paxton tries to find out if Gautam Malkani's much-hyped Londonstani is 'authentic' by visiting a class of teenagers from Hounslow, West London--where the novel is set:

Two weeks before its publication, the book is already notorious for two things: the money and the language.The centre of a huge bidding war at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, it was bought by Fourth Estate for a six-figure advance (the rumour is £380,000).

Why the fuss? Mainly because Londonstani is written in a head-spinning, expletive-rich mixture of Asian street slang, text-speak, MTV talk and bastardised Punjabi that supposedly reflects the patois of West London Asian gangs. By writing in dialect, Malkani has set himself a tough task; it has worked for Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh, but critics had their doubts about the dictated letters in dialect that appeared in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

That's not a very apt comparison. The issue with the chapters written in Hasina's point of view in Brick Lane is this: Hasina presumably writes her letters in Bengali, her native language, and the novelist renders them for us in English. And yet the language of the letters is a pidginized English, which is a rather odd stylistic choice. But based on the description of Malkani's book, he's actually trying to approximate the dialect of English that these kids are using. In any case, Paxton leaves the class with reassurances from the kids that the author had gotten it right even if "you would never, ever write these words down."

He Speaks To God

In last week's issue of Tel Quel, Driss Bennani writes about Sheikh Yassine, the spiritual leader of Al-Adl wa Al-Ihsane (Justice and Charity), and the personality cult he's been developing for some time. (If you don't read French, you can run the text through this online translator; it's won't be too accurate, but it'll give you an idea, and at least you'll have a good laugh at some of the lines):

Un militant raconte : "j’ai vu le prophète Mohammed, et je lui ai demandé de me montrer le chemin de Dieu. Il m’a souri, puis a désigné de sa main une tente d'où sortait une lumière éblouissante. à l’intérieur, Abdessalam Yassine ramassait des branches d'arbre par terre. Le prophète s’est alors tourné vers moi et m’a dit, en désignant Sidi Abdessalam : demande à cet homme. Lui, il sait”. Dans les "visions" de ses disciples, Yassine est toujours accompagné du prophète ou de ses sahaba (compagnons). Il est clairement désigné comme étant "le lieutenant de Dieu sur terre" (tel quel). Au Maroc, mais pas seulement. Au Mali (et cette fois, ce n’est pas une "vision"), un alem soufi a brandi le portrait de Yassine et a demandé à ses disciples s'ils le connaissaient. Non, ils ne le connaissaient pas. Le maître soufi le leur a alors présenté en ces termes : "c'est le calife choisi par le prophète et il est au Maroc. Il faut que vous le connaissiez. C'est votre guide spirituel". Au Maroc, un lieutenant du vieux cheikh a tenté d'être "plus rationnel". Selon lui, le calife que les musulmans attendent est censé réunir "dix qualités" - évidemment, Yassine les a toutes.

Tout comme le prophète, sa famille est “bénie” : quand les disciples parlent de sa fille Nadia ou de sa mère Rqia, ils ajoutent à son nom l’expression "radia Allahou ânha" - une formule normalement réservée à la famille du prophète et à ses compagnons. D’ailleurs, Yassine aussi a des compagnons, encore une fois comme le prophète. Ce sont les membres du majliss al irchad (conseil de guidance) ou du majliss arrabbani (conseil divin - rien de moins). Eux aussi sont bénis parce que proches de Yassine. Le parallèle avec les sahaba est flagrant. Chaque déplacement du vieil homme est un véritable événement. L'année dernière (un enregistrement vidéo est disponible), Yassine a été reçu avec les honneurs dus à un chef d'Etat dans le hall de l'aéroport Mohammed V, alors qu'il revenait simplement... d'Agadir. Une vingtaine de lieutenants de la jamaâ se sont alignés à la sortie des voyageurs et lui ont tous embrassé la main ou l'épaule. Cherchez le parallèle... En permettant à ses disciples femmes de mentir à leurs parents et à leurs maris pour assister aux rencontres d'Al Adl, Yassine se paye le luxe de dépasser les interdits coraniques, en l’occcurrence ici celui du mensonge. Dans la jamaâ, Yassine est tout : le père, le guide spirituel, le leader politique… Sans lui, les autres responsables de la jamaâ ne sont rien. Quand il a vidé sans ménagement Mohamed Bachiri, pourtant co-fondateur de la jamaâ, personne n’a bronché. Le cheikh ne se trompe jamais.

So now we have militants who see in their dreams validation for divine leadership, who speak of their leader using language reserved for the Prophet himself, and who refer to his daughter as though she were Fatima. And to top it off, their leader "never makes mistakes." Of course not, he's a got a direct phone line to God. Hey, I have a dream too: How about we worry about problems, like, oh, I don't know, unemployment and poverty?

But perhaps those of you who live in Washington, DC, might be able to get some answers from Nadia Yassine, the Sheikh's daughter and de facto spokesperson for the group. Mrs. Yassine will appear in Georgetown University on April 20. Here is the event description:

The daughter of the founder of the Moroccan movement Al-Adl wa-l-Ihsan (Justice and Spirituality Association, or JSA), Nadia Yassine is the founder of the JSA Women's Department. Her first book, Toutes voiles dehors [English translation, Full Sails Ahead], was published in 2003 by Le Fennec in Morocco and Altereditions in France. She was the first to proclaim that the Mudawwana (the Moroccan family code) was not sacrosanct and must be revised.

What? So now she's taking credit for the reform of the Moudawana?? Do the people who invited her know that she led a march against the reforms in Casablanca in the spring of 2000? (By the way, 'ihsan' does not mean 'spirituality.' Sounds like a lame attempt to make her sound like a real Sufi.)

March Takes Pulitzer

I had expected E.L. Doctorow to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The March, but the prize went to another, similarly titled book: March, by Geraldine Brooks.

April 17, 2006

Goytisolo Profile

Several people sent me this link to Fernanda Eberstadt's profile of Marrakech-based Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine. Nothing terribly new in the piece, and I suppose I would have enjoyed it were it not for comments like this:

[Goytisolo's] political essays, denouncing the official neglect that led to last November's rioting in Paris suburbs, the corruption and tyranny of Arab governments or what he sees as the pernicious influence of Christian evangelism on American foreign policy, appear in Europe's most prestigious newspapers.

The neglect of minorities in France and the tyranny of Arab governments are stated as incontrovertible facts, but the influence of Christian evangelism gets to be qualified with a "what he sees as." Ugh.

LBC Spring Pick

The Lit Blog Co-Op has made its spring 2006 'Read This!' selection: Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Television, translated by Jordan Stump. Tune in all week to find which other titles were nominated, and to read nominators' posts.

Grande Debut

When she was nine years old, Reyna Grande came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant. Years later, she graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a degree in creative writing and was a 2003 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Her debut novel Across A Hundred Mountains, tells the story of two undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Daniel Olivas reviews the book for the El Paso Times.

In the nonlinear narrative, chapters alternate between her two female protagonists, Juana Garcia and Adelina Vasquez. First, we have Juana, a young girl who lives in a small Mexican village in extreme poverty. When a flood leads to yet another death in her family -- a death that Juana feels responsible for -- Juana's father believes that he must earn more money to house his family in safer quarters. He believes that there are abundant opportunities "en el otro lado," based on a letter from a friend: "Apá's friend wrote about riches unheard of, streets that never end, and buildings that nearly reach the sky. He wrote that there's so much money to be made, and so much food to eat, that people there don't know what hunger is."

Read the rest here.

New Poetry Anthology

Writing for the NYTBR, William Logan is not entirely pleased with the choices that David Lehman made for The Oxford book of American Poetry:

The dirty secret of American poetry is that until Whitman and Dickinson it was no damn good, and until the modernists it was not good again. It takes only 10 pages for the new "Oxford Anthology of American Poetry," edited by David Lehman, to get through the 17th century, and 10 more for the 18th. The whole 19th century takes fewer than 200, and half that is devoted to Whitman and Dickinson. After that, for 900 pages, it is one long diet of the 20th century.

Lehman, though a poet himself, is better known as editor of the annual series "The Best American Poetry" and author of "Signs of the Times," an attack on deconstructive literary theory. "The Oxford Book of American Verse," as it was first known, was edited by the distinguished scholar F. O. Matthiessen in 1950 and, as "The New Oxford Book of American Verse," revised by the equally distinguished Richard Ellmann in 1976. Lehman's introduction, a good deal of it a defense against his predecessors, lives in a prose world where assumptions are governing, essays seminal and stock always goes sky-high. He's proud of what he calls the "widening of focus" here, though it's hard to see why this isn't just "out of focus" by another name. Matthiessen, as Lehman notes, included 51 poets, and Ellmann 78; Lehman has 210, nearly a quarter of them born between 1940 and 1950. This grotesquely overrates the wartime and baby-boom generation, still an amorphous crowd of genial talent through which Lehman offers no path.

Read it here.

Flaubert Bio

Over at Salon, Stephen Amidon praises Frederick Brown's biography of Gustave Flaubert:

Perhaps the most valuable accomplishment of Brown's biography is to situate Flaubert squarely amid his turbulent times, echoing the achievement of the biographer's 1995 "Zola: A Life." During Flaubert's lifetime, France experienced both rapid modernization, seen most readily in Baron Haussmann's radical re-altering of the Parisian cityscape, and constant political upheaval. Although Flaubert often made noises about being above this historical hubbub, he had a knack for landing himself smack dab in the middle of it. In 1848, a curious Flaubert and Du Camp were actually among the first to enter Tuileries Palace after Louis-Phillipe's hasty abdication; during the disastrous 1871 war against Prussia, Flaubert was evicted from his beloved lifelong home Croisset by invading German troops, and later attended the court-martial of Communards after their unsuccessful socialist uprising in Paris. Despite being a stridently self-professed 'bourgeoisophobe,' however, Flaubert had little time for the revolutionaries. As Brown points out, the author, an "affluent bourgeois sustained by unearned income from [his family's] farmland, had no use for egalitarian doctrine. Declaring that only three or four hundred men a century has historical weight, he regarded utopian socialism as the worst despotism. Inherently unintelligent was the mass qua mass."

And in the New York Times Book Review, James Wood offers similar words of appreciation:

Brown's biography will clearly be the Life for this generation, and it grandly swipes away -- mentioning it only in the bibliography -- its most recent rival, Geoffrey Wall's rather academic and Freudian account of five years ago. Unlike Wall, Brown has no obvious agenda (he could in fact have benefited from one in his literary criticism); he simply opens himself up to Flaubert's colossal contradictions. From his earliest days, Gustave Flaubert was both a romantic and a realist, a dreamer and a debunker. He was the son of the chief surgeon of the hospital in Rouen, and never shied away from looking at unclothed truth: no one ever forgets the grotesque comedy of Charles Bovary's operation on Hippolyte's clubfoot. Of "Madame Bovary," the critic Sainte-Beuve would say in a contemporary review that Flaubert wielded his pen like a scalpel. But he also loved to surrender to romantic flights of fancy, to historical exoticism and erotic Orientalism. He was still unable to read at the age of 7, Brown tells us, because he was so enthralled by a local neighbor, an elderly man who told Gustave tales from "Don Quixote." "I find all my roots in the book I knew by heart before learning how to read, 'Don Quixote,' " he later said, and indeed the fantasist at war with reality is the dominant note of both "Madame Bovary" and "Sentimental Education."

The hardcover of Flaubert: A Biography is pretty pricey, so I'll have to wait until it's out in paperback to get it.

The 'People' Problem

The latest issue of the London Review of Books has a short essay by Ilan Pappe about the 'demographic problem' in Israel:

Once the ‘Arabs’ in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as ‘Muslims’ it was easy to elicit support for Israel’s demographic policies, at least where it counted: on Capitol Hill. But even in Europe there was no need, after 9/11, to explain why Israel has a ‘demographic problem’. On 2 February 2003 the popular daily Maariv carried a typical headline: ‘A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims.’ The piece went on to describe this fact as Israel’s next ‘ticking bomb’. The increase in the ‘Muslim’ population – 2.4 per cent a year – was not a problem anymore, but a ‘danger’.

In the run-up to the election, pundits discussed this question using language akin to that employed in Europe and the United States in debates over immigration. Here, however, it is the immigrant community that decides the future of the indigenous population, not vice versa. On 7 February 1948, after driving to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and seeing the first villages that had been emptied of Palestinians on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, a jubilant Ben-Gurion reported to a gathering of Zionist leaders: ‘When I come nowadays to Jerusalem I feel it is a Hebrew city. This was a feeling I only had in farms and in Tel Aviv. Not all Jerusalem is Hebraic but there is already a huge Hebraic bloc – no Arabs in it. One hundred per cent Jewish. If we can persevere,’ Ben-Gurion added, this miracle will happen elsewhere.

But despite their perseverance, a sizable community of Palestinians remained. They are students at my university, where they attend lectures by professors who talk about the grave demographic problem. Palestinian law students – the lucky ones who constitute an informal quota – in the Hebrew University may well come across Ruth Gabison, a former head of the Association for Civil Rights and a candidate for the Supreme Court, who has come out recently with strong views on the subject, views that probably seem to her to reflect a consensus. ‘Israel has the right to control Palestinian natural growth,’ she has declared.

Read the rest here.