September 29, 2006

Desai Review

Those of you who subscribe to TLS, check out Hirsh Sawhney's review of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. I read the novel earlier this summer and it really stayed with me--a very fine work. It was recently shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize, and is now out in paperback. I'd love to give away a copy, but I have finally, finally finished packing my books.

Rendition to Morocco

The Moroccan Human Rights Association is asking the government to come clean about rendition in the kingdom. The BBC reports:

Abdelhamid Amine, who is their chairman, said both the Moroccan government and Washington had to come clean.

"The United States, which declares itself a democratic country, must recognise that these so-called black sites exist and that torture goes on there," he said.

"The United States justifies all this in the name of its war against terrorism. But we, as the defenders of human rights in Morocco, cannot accept that in the name of the war on terror you can also violate human rights or practice the terrorism of torture."

Predictably, the Minister of Justice denies the existence of any CIA prisons, etc.

Desktop Clean-Up

I still have not finished packing my office. Today, though, I tried to go through all the clutter on my desk. Here's what I found so far:

1 half-used box of small index cards.
1 set of large index cards with old notes and ideas for short stories.
2 jumbo-size paper clips.
2 staplers.
2 tape dispensers.
1 iKlear laptop cleaner.
3 bobby pins.
2 sets of Chinese hairpins.
2 hair bands.
1 butterfly pin.
2 half-used books of stamps.
My log book.
My note book.
1 pair of earplugs.
1 pair of reading glasses prescribed to me by a zealous optometrist back in 1998, and which I have never used nor needed.
1 nail file.
1 Wite Out.
1 map of Rabat, 1 of Casablanca, 1 of Morocco.
1 file folder labeled 'Events', 1 labeled 'Fulbright.'
1 Authors' Guild Bulletin.
1 greeting card that says, "You're the best auntie in the world." Aww.
4 pens, 2 highlighters.
A photo of my beloved grandmother, my mother, my younger brother, and me.
1 voucher for a yoga class.
Eye drops.
My cell phone.
The Anchor Book of Arabic Fiction.
Season of Migration to the North by Tayib Salih.
The Fall 2006 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review.
1 yellow notepad, half-used. The last item says, "Call Keiko."
A bibliography of works on Morocco.
My laptop.
A publicity postcard for my book.
A United Airlines frequent-flyer card.
A reminder to make a dentist appointment. The reminder dates from January 17, 2006.
The July-August issue of World Literature Today.
The latest issue of the New Yorker, with 4 phone numbers scribbled on the cover.
1 chapstick.
The neighbor's house keys.
My overflowing box of rejection letters.
Fan letters: A two-page one from a seventeen-year-old; a ten-page one from an inmate on death row.
1 phone recharger.
4 old back-ups for my laptop.
1 Dust Blaster Pro.
1 file labeled 'Interesting Articles/Stuff To read.'
A collection of misspellings of my name, which I cut out of envelopes and other correspondence.
Various drafts of various parts of my novel.
My laptop.

And I need to trim this list to:

My laptop.

September 28, 2006

New LRB

The new issue of the London Review of Books is up online. It includes Frank Kermode's review of Edward Said's book on late style, though that piece is available to subscribers only.

Read, Weep, Start Over

Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick provides a very clear-headed analysis of the proposed torture bill that is now on the fast track toward become a law.

Asked whether he had "access to more information about this than any of us because you've been in the negotiations," the senator was not reassuring. He knows "only what the president talked about in his speech." To clarify: McCain, the Geneva Conventions' great defender, is signing off on interrogation limits he knows nothing about. And so, it appears, will the most of the rest of Congress.

But that's not all. Congress doesn't want to know what it's bargaining away this week. In the Boston Globe this weekend, Rick Klein revealed that only "10 percent of the members of Congress have been told which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under proposed changes to the War Crimes Act." More troubling still, this congressional ignorance seems to be by choice. Klein quotes Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican, as saying, "I don't know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know." Evidently, "widely distributing such information could result in leaks."

We've reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well.

If I ever meet another democrat who waxes poetic about John McCain, I don't answer for my actions.

Manmohan Singh, Call Your Publicist

For those who may have missed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, it's up on YouTube. Not to be missed.

We Love It When Good Things Happen To Good People

Carl Phillips has received a $25,000 fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Many congratulations.

(via.)

September 27, 2006

Preps

It's been a bit quiet here at Dar Moorishgirl, as I've been busy preparing for my upcoming nine-month stay in Morocco. By far the hardest task has been to pack up my office--a frighteningly messy place most of the time, now made even scarier by the addition of boxes and packing material everywhere. Alex has been very organized about his stuff, though. His comics collection is already in bins, and his books are neatly boxed and already stored in the basement. I've been begging him to help, but whenever he touches something, I tell him not to pack that yet, that I might still need it. Hence the continuing mess. And have I mentioned I'm revising the last third of my novel? And traveling? And trying to find a furnished apartment in Casablanca? God help me.

September 26, 2006

Hope, Now Out in Paperback

The paperback edition of my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is due to be released by Harcourt a week from today, on October 2nd. But it has already started appearing at bookstores, as well as on Powells.com, Amazon.com, and BarnesandNoble.com. The vast majority of the books I own are soft covers, and it will be nice to finally place my book next to others like it on the shelf.

I will be doing several events in the fall for the promotion of the paperback release. Please check my events page for details, and come by and say hello.

News You Can Lose

Tom Engelhardt, writing in the Nation's blog, examines various covers of Newsweek magazine:

For a little thought experiment, go to the website of Newsweek's international edition. There, running down the left side of the page, are three covers, all the same, for the European, Asian, and Latin American editions of the October 2 issue.

Each has a dramatic shot of a Taliban fighter shouldering an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade). The cover headline is: "Losing Afghanistan," pointing to a devastating piece on our Afghan War by Ron Moreau, Sami Yousafzai, and Michael Hirsh, "The Rise of Jihadistan." which sports this subhead: "Five years after the Afghan invasion, the Taliban are fighting back hard, carving out a sanctuary where they--and Al Qaeda's leaders--can operate freely." (...) Now, go back to the international edition and take another look. Scroll down the page to the cover which doesn't match the others. That's the one for Newsweek's US edition. No Taliban fighter. No RPG. Instead, a photo of an ash-blond woman with three young children dressed in white, one in her arms, and the headline: "My Life in Pictures."

Read the article here. Is it any wonder, then, that so many Americans are misinformed about the wars our government is waging?

Order a Fatwa

There seems to be a cash-for-fatwa scandal in India. Apparently, you can order your very own edict for as little as $22. I wonder how much it would cost to get a fatwa on fatwas.

September 25, 2006

Sayed Kashua's Let It Be Morning and Dancing Arabs

The latest issue of the Boston Review includes my essay about writing in a non-native language, looking specifically at Sayed Kashua's novels Let It Be Morning and Dancing Arabs. Here's an excerpt:

Those who write fiction in a language other than their own are often asked what motivates their decision, even though this literary choice has a long and rich history. Joseph Conrad, for instance, did not write in Polish, his mother tongue; instead, and after 20 years of world travel, he settled in England and embraced its language in his work. Milan Kundera chose French rather than Czech for his later books because he wanted to free himself of expectations and censorship. Elias Canetti, whose native language is Ladino, opted for German, though he lived most of his life in England and Switzerland. But for others, the decision to give up their mother tongue was not a choice at all. It was the inescapable result of colonial education—witness, for example, the vast literature in French that came out of Africa in the wake of France’s century of hegemony: Assia Djebbar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Camara Laye, and Léopold Sedar Senghor, to name just a handful.

What is striking about these shifting linguistic allegiances is that they tend to favor the language that is culturally dominant on the international scene. Thus, despite the great diversity of reasons for writing in a foreign language, the writer’s choice is often interpreted as a political statement, and in particular as a form of capitulation. This was precisely what prompted the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o to abandon English and return to Gikuyu, his native tongue, and what led him to argue, in Decolonizing the Mind, that other African writers should do the same.

But does creative expression in a foreign language always equal the rejection of native culture and the embrace of another? Or can it also be a way to challenge readers’ assumptions? The work of the young novelist Sayed Kashua raises just these questions.

Read the rest here.

Danticat on Torture

Novelist and activist Edwidge Danticat has a lovely opinion piece in the Washington Post about torture:

For many who remember -- just as these women do, and my own parents do -- what it means to live under a dictatorial regime, a regime in which citizens must leave work or school to witness public executions, torture is not just an individual affliction but a communal one. And now, when political leaders in the United States are asking us as a society to consider not only the legal and moral ramifications of torture but its effectiveness, we are brought closer to these regimes than we may think. If we are part of all that has touched us, as Alfred Tennyson wrote, then we are all endorsers of torture when it is done in our name.

Torture aims for a single goal -- obtaining information -- but it achieves a slew of others.

The piece is quite au point, considering the fact that the Cheney-McCain deal has essentially given Bush free reign to define what torture is.

September 22, 2006

Reading: Portland, Oregon

I'm going to be doing a reading for our local library's Banned Books Week, which is "an annual celebration of the freedom to read that highlights the importance of intellectual freedom and reminds us not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted." Here are the details:

Saturday, September 23
2:30 - 4:00 PM
Café Banned - Celebrating the Freedom to Read
Central Library
Multnomah County Library
Portland, Oregon

Open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Letter to America

Iranian writer and journalist Akbar Ganji has an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled, "Letter to America".

In Iran, we hope to achieve our goal of a new polity and a new constitution not by violence but by following a peaceful and democratic path. And in this struggle we need moral support from all freedom-loving people around the world -- particularly the United States.

We want the world to know that our rulers do not represent the Iranian people and that their religion is not the religion of the entire nation. We ask that in shaping its policies toward the Iranian regime, the United States not overlook the interests of Iranian civil society. In particular, we hope that America listens to those in Iran who fear that policies intended to contain the current crisis might in fact lead to a greater crisis, and to war.

Read it all here.

"Republic of Fear"

Read this, and weep for the people of Iraq:

The republic of fear is born again. The state of terror now gripping Iraq is as bad as it was under Saddam Hussein. Torture in the country may even be worse than it was during his rule, the United Nation's special investigator on torture said yesterday.

In related news, a 78-year-old man, who is nearly blind and needs a walker to move, has been released from the American base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after three years of imprisonment, and without charges being filed against him.

(via.)

Ramadan 1427

Ramadan Mubarak to all my Muslim readers. May you all have a happy and healthy holiday.

September 21, 2006

Shafak Acquitted

Predictably, Elif Shafak has been acquitted of the charge that she had "insulted Turkishness" in her most recent novel, Father and Bastard. Shafak was not present at her trial--she delivered her first child on Saturday. The name of that baby girl is Sheherazad. A wise choice, and one that prosecutors ought to pay attention to. Their intimidations will not stop the woman from telling stories.

Article 301, which made the charges against Shafak possible, is still in the books, although there is a tiny hope that the government might reform its ways:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also welcomed the verdict and signalled that the government would consider amending Article 301 of Turkey's penal code. It envisages up to three years in jail for "denigrating Turkish national identity".

"The ruling party and the opposition can sit down together again to discuss this issue as laws are not eternal," Anatolia news agency quoted Mr Erdogan as saying.

So it's wait and see at this point.

(Thanks to N. and S. for the link.)

Adichie's Second

One of the fall 2006 books I was most excited about is Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Set in the 1960s, during the aborted attempt to set up an independent state in Biafra, the book tells the story of three characters whose loyalties to their ideas, ideals, and one another, are tested. There's thirteen-year-old Ugwu, a houseboy for a university professor, Olanna, the professor's mistress; and Richard, an Englishman infatuated with Olanna's twin sister. You can read some of the early (and mostly excellent) reviews of the book: Janet Maslin in the New York Times, Martin Rubin in the San Francisco Chronicle, Merle Rubin in the L.A. Times.

Some related links:
Adichie's website.
Debbie Elliot's interview with Adichie on NPR.
Adichie writes about the books that have influenced her in the Guardian.

September 20, 2006

Fiction On Trial

Last year, when the Turkish government's case against novelist Orhan Pamuk was thrown out of court on a technicality, many had hoped that Article 301--the law that makes it illegal to "insult Turkishness," whatever that means--would also be purged from the penal code. It has not.

Now it is the turn of novelist Elif Shafak to go on trial for something she has written, and which has irked the establishment. What makes her case even more remarkable is that, this time, the supposed "insult to Turkishness" comes from a fictional character in one of her novels, Father and Bastard (English title: The Bastard of Istanbul.) The character speaks about the (otherwise well-documented) genocide of Armenians by Turks in 1915, and apparently it is illegal to imagine such a scene in a novel. Shafak's trial opens today in Istanbul. It also bears mention that the writer was pregnant during all these stressful weeks; she delivered just five days ago, and now she must attend the trial against her.

Shafak is only one among many (eighteen, to be precise) writers and journalists who are being harrassed via Article 301. You can read more about the cases here.

Photo: Homelands Productions

September 19, 2006

Best News I've Heard In A While

The amazing George Saunders has been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. His reaction: "I feel smarter already!"

(via.)

Judt on Liberals

There's an excellent and thorough essay by Tony Judt in the current issue of the London Review of Books about liberals' failure to stand up against Bush's foreign policy, against his attack on civil liberties, and, more generally, against power. Here's a taste:

Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style themselves ‘liberal intellectuals’ are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security.

A highly recommended piece.

Rendition To Syria

A Canadian engineer who was rendered by the United States to Syria for torture in 2002 has been fully cleared of all the terrorism charges against him.

The report is aimed primarily at Canada's own government and activities, rather than the U.S. government, which refused to cooperate in the inquiry. But its conclusions draw more attention to the Bush administration's handling of terror suspects, at a time that the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.

This is not the first such case, and not nearly the last. You can read it all here.

Suzanne Kamata Recommends

The young Jewish and Arab women portrayed in Wandering Star are so convincing that it's easy to forget that the book was written by a sixty-something-year-old French man. J.M.G. Le Clezio also understands that while in wartime it is most often the men who go off to fight and die, it is the women who bear the brunt of their battles.

Wandering Star begins with a young girl named Esther who lives with her family in St. Martin, a French town occupied by Italian soldiers during World War II. These men, from just over the border, are in control of the village, but the real enemy, the German Gestapo, has not arrived yet. Esther's friend, Gasparini tells her, "if the Germans come here, they'll kill all the Jews." She hides her identity behind a French name, Helene, and has false papers, but she and the other Jews in the village live in fear. Knowing that her future is uncertain, Esther is especially appreciative of the world around her - the sun on her bare skin, the taste of a wheat kernel, the coolness of the water as she dives into the gorge. Meanwhile, she and her family dream of Israel, where they will be free and safe.

When the Germans finally do come, Esther’s father is killed. She and her mother flee to Italy and then to Israel, where they witness the raising of the Israeli flag for the first time. Of course, they encounter many complications on the way. On the road to Jerusalem, Esther crosses paths with 16-year-old Nejma, who has been driven from her home. The two young women experience a moment of empathy, though they are supposedly enemies. They exchange names then go their separate ways in search of home and safety.

Nejma winds up in Nour Chams Camp. Her parents are dead. Her mother died in childbirth and her father was killed in the bombing of Nahariyya. Nejma is a survivor, however, and she cobbles together a new family among the refugees. First, she adopts the strong, wise Houriya as her aunt. Later, they take in Roumiya, a pregnant woman, driven half-mad by grief over the death of her husband in battle. The refugees wait for the United Nations truck bearing food and medicine that never comes. The camp becomes infested with disease. Ultimately, Nejma must take flight again in order to save herself.

Although the lives of these young women are filled with suffering, this novel is infused with hope. As Aamma Houriya points out after delivering Roumiya’s child in a urine-scented ravine, “the most beautiful thing can appear in the most vile place, among the refuse.” Beautifully written and seamlessly translated by C. Dickson, Wandering Star is both a coming-of-age story and a powerful tale of survival. For readers hoping to better understand the world we live in, this book also helps shed light on current events in the Middle East.

American Suzanne Kamata lives in Tokushima, Prefecture, Japan. She's the editor of the anthology The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and the Fiction Co-Editor of literarymama.com.

September 18, 2006

Other People's Books

When you visit your friends' houses, do you find yourself scanning their bookshelves to see what books they have? Jay Parini shares some of his own, exploratory experiences in a brief piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here he is, discussing a visit to Graham Greene's apartment:

I've known any number of writers and have warm recollections of wandering in their houses, seeing what books they had on the shelves, by chance or choice. Sometimes an anomaly struck me. I remember being shocked, for example, by how few books Graham Greene had in his home in Antibes. It was, of course, an apartment, not a big house, that Greene occupied. And he was by nature peripatetic, shifting among countries, even continents, right to the end of his life. It was, he told me, an inconvenience to own a lot of books, as they're heavy in one's bag. So he kept only those authors who really mattered to him: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and, to my surprise, the 19th-century naval hero and prolific novelist Capt. Frederick Marryat. "Now Marryat," Greene said to me, "there is a writer!"

You can read it all here.

Reading Recap: Knoxville, Tennessee

Audience: About 500.
Anxiety index: 3 (out of 10).
Surprise guest(s): A woman who patiently waited in line at the signing and then told me: "I'm very proud of you, but I'm also very angry with you. Why did you have to make the only covered girl in your book end up as a prostitute?"
No. of Moroccans who said hello: 0. (Where are you?)

Since the publication of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I've had many occasions to engage in conversations with readers: I've given three dozen readings, in more than fifteen cities, on two continents. One of the most touching, though, was this past week, when I spoke at the University of Tennessee for the Life of the Mind program. Hope was assigned to the entire freshman class, and it was an exhilarating and humbling experience to hear so many young people discuss my book. I enjoyed reading some of the papers they had written, watching as they agreed or disagreed on particular interpretations, and of course talking to various groups of students at different venues. The largest of these was the Cox Auditorium, which holds several hundred seats--it was my biggest reading yet--but I also liked smaller sit-downs with honors students or with creative writing majors. Oh, and everything you've heard about southern hospitality is true.

Photo: Daily Beacon

Mishra on Amis

I thought that Martin Amis's long essay--published, not coincidentally, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks-- was quite short-sighted. I also found myself in agreement with Pankaj Mishra, who has a reaction to Amis in yesterday's Observer. Under the title "The Politics of Paranoia," Mishra examines the failure of many policy makers and intellectuals to understand large parts of the world with which they are engaged.

Many people, such as Martin Amis last weekend, may continue to berate Muslims for their apparent incompatibility with 'Western' values of democracy and rationality. We could go on debating forever whether the terrorist acts of British Muslims are directly linked to British policy in the Middle East. But a more urgent question is: where will all this rage and distrust end? Are we hurtling towards the kind of wars that made the previous century so uniquely bloody? How can we change policies that have so comprehensively failed?

These questions are relevant in democracies, where responsibility for far-reaching decisions lies with political and business elites as well as such shapers of public opinion as journalists, columnists and think-tank pundits. There is no place for such questions in societies that men like Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah preside over, countries where intellectual debate and press freedoms are severely limited. Yet even as these questions have become increasingly urgent in democratic countries, the answers remain elusive. For the 'war on terror' is not just a political and military fiasco but also an intellectual one, combining fatally the arrogance of power with the arrogance of mind.

Mishra uses the Vietnam war as an example of what went wrong. You can read the article in full here.

Salih, Bil 'Arabiya

I am desperate for copies of Tayib Salih's two books, Season of Migration to the North and The Wedding of Zein-- but in Arabic. If anyone can help me out, please email me. I am more than happy to send you payment, or exchange books, or both.

Update: Found! Thanks very much to the readers who helped out.

September 14, 2006

Dzanc Debuts

Dan Wickett, he of the Emerging Writers Network, and his partner Steve Gillis have just launched Dzanc Books. Many congratulations.

Backing Down

The Wahhabi regime's rumored proposal to ban women from the circumambulation area in Mecca's Grand Mosque has been rejected, according to Arab News. Apparently they've also decide to allocate 53% of the mosque to female pilgrims.

Bumbershoot Photo

The shelver at Seattle's University Bookstore ("I am the shelver. I shelve books.") has posted a photo he took at last week's Bumbershoot festival of Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill, and, uh, me. Hmm. Someone needs to figure out how to use a digital camera.

September 13, 2006

HODP Reading: Knoxville, Tennessee

A reminder to readers in the Knoxville area: I will be reading tonight at the University of Tennessee. Here are the details:

Laila Lalami, author of this year's Life of the Mind book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, will speak on Wednesday evening, September 13, at 7:00 in Cox Auditorium, Alumni Memorial Building. Her presentation will be followed by a booksigning.

More here.

Horrorism and Other Isms

Last weekend, Martin Amis published a long essay in the Observer about the "Age of Horrorism." I have a response of sorts up on the Guardian Comment Is Free. Here is an excerpt:

Radical Islam is wholly deserving of the contempt that Amis shows it, and yet I remain unconvinced by his assurances of respect for Islam. Indeed, most of his essay is couched in classic "clash of civilizations" rhetoric, using terms that have become so hackneyed in our global culture as to lose meaning. Amis argues that the world has entered "an age of terror," where the West, a place "where there are no good excuses for religious belief," is under threat from the east, a region where "almost every living citizen...is intimately defined by religious belief." Furthermore, the specific culprit within the east is "Islam," but within the west it is "30 years of multicultural relativism."

You can read more here.

Guest Column: Valerie Trueblood

This week, Seattle writer Valerie Trueblood contributes a column about Swiss writer C.-F.Ramuz. Valerie's first novel, Seven Loves, came out this summer from Little, Brown. She is at work on an essay about the fiction of Ramuz, a book of dog stories, and a second novel.

In July, it got so hot in Seattle--a near-100-degree, breathless, un-Pacific-Northwest heat--that I thought of a novel I used to love, and took it off the shelf and read it again: The End of All Men. It made a hot night even longer. It's not a book to take your mind off global warming.

The great Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, who wrote of life on the steep pastures of the Swiss Alps, published Présence de la Mort in the twenties. Here we waited until 1944 for a translation, The End of All Men. Ramuz has been compared to Hardy for his depiction of rural life, but his barely individualized characters are no kin of Tess and Jude. Hardy would recognize the way their fates dog them, but fate, for a character in Ramuz's disaster novels, is nothing deserved or tragically earned, it's a blow dealt straight from earth and sky onto the body. Reading Ramuz is an exercise in giving up ideas of human cause and effect, and feeling the rumble of tectonic plates. But the humans are there, tiny figures living lives of great particularity on the ground-and somehow we want to go along on their hopeless errands. What is to become of them, these men and women in whom character is beside the point?

And how do these stories conceived just after the Great War differ from our earthquake and asteroid and Ebola-virus blockbusters? For one thing, they're masterpieces. For another, there's nobody in them with foresight, nobody who takes measures, no brainy-romantic operator to get the world out of a fix. There's no way out.

The events Ramuz describes are of mythic enormity. For him, the technology dear to most speculative fiction does not exist. In The End of All Men, hope, not surprisingly, is gone, but it is barely missed as the physical details of existence go on accumulating-and in the hands of this writer these are glorious.

Something has disrupted gravity and the earth has begun to fall towards the sun. It's getting hotter by five degrees a day, and the climbing mercury, only touched on in a glimpse of sweat running off fingers or a cow lying with its horn stuck in mud, inhabits every scene. Ramuz writes as one who, sitting looking out his own window, sees his book going on. It's all happening in a "here," told in three persons: I, Ramuz, comes and goes in the heat, coolly summoning you, the reader, to see what they, the villagers, are going to be driven to do.

Scenes ugly and tender unfold, impassively described, utterly lacking what we now call "edge." In the face of extinction a married pair bicker about their savings, police are posted at the bank, men go on shoeing horses, people get drunk and have an orgy, there's a final war. Ramuz's narrator, but for his grave sadness, would seem to have the calm relish of an auteur strolling the set. His picture comes at us in pixels, intimate and broken: a boot or a neck, "suspenders stitched with crosses," a foraging kitten. It fills in until the vast scale is apparent (see this photograph of his region), as aloof from individual ruin as Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

Drought, and then a great heat: everybody's about to die. Why read on? Because Ramuz, who says, "I tried to close my eyes to see heaven: it was the earth," poses the question of exactly what our own attitude is to the earth, and by the time we finish reading this eighty-some-year-old fantasy we've lost our comfortable environmentalism and begun to grieve. And we read because the book is mesmerizing. Some of the cool, regular caress of his French prose is lost in English, but its walking pace and oddly confiding formality survive. He called the washing of lake waters his teacher: "teaching me accent, teaching me repetition, teaching me length."

"Set down nothing but what is seen." Ramuz is a philosopher at heart and doesn't obey his own rule, but his village is voluptuously itself, every detail corroborated by another. A swollen, unmilked cow moos "behind a sack-cloth curtain somewhere; first one cow and then another, and still another now, because they all imitate each other." Water fools people; instead of drying up it rises as the glaciers melt, "running between the blackberry and the gooseberry bushes, the great clumps of dahlias...it has ventured right into the kitchen." This awful, inquisitive, domesticated water "is no longer as it was, so disturbed and warm it is."

The lens zooms in and out: close-up of a pointless murder, upward pan to the hanging ice. Glimpses of village and family life dimming, going out. Wide view of towns, each one a republic organized to guard its pond. A band of men chasing another from a mountain retreat, the expelled returning to smoke the usurpers out with a smudge-bomb and shoot them. Boats from cities (these amusingly outside Ramuz's frame), loaded with passengers trusting to the polar ice for rescue.

We live in a country where many are awaiting the end-time in just the imperturbable mood of the village imbecile in this book. I wish the president, who is said to be reading Camus, would spend one of these hot summer nights in Crawford reading The End of All Men. It's simple enough. Anyone can look up from the page and picture a glacier melting. There's even a divine figure of some sort at the end, where we get something the president might identify as the Rapture, only no one is left behind.

'Watching the World Change'

David Friend's Watching the World Change is a collection of photographs and commentary about iconic immages from the September 11 attacks. You can view a few of them here, and listen to an interview with him and some of the people who took the photos on NPR.

September 12, 2006

In Tennessee

I'm in Knoxville, Tennessee, this week, to attend a couple of events for UT's Life of the Mind program. The entire class of 2010 was assigned my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, to read over the summer and to discuss during fall welcome week. So many young minds, so little time.

Yehoshua and Khouri

Novelists Elias Khouri and A.B. Yehoshua talk to NPR about the July/August war in Lebanon and Israel. Worth checking out.

September 11, 2006

Kenyan Satire

Two reviews of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow appeared this weekend, and both were notable for engaging with the novel on its own terms. In the Washington Post, Aminatta Forna acknowledges didactic lapses in the novel, but she also points out that Ngugi's work is read aloud in public spaces in Kenya, in the Gikuyu language. (Consistent with Ngugi's stance for most of his career, the book was written in Gikuyu first; he then translated it into English.)

In the New York Times, Jeff Turrentine gently questions Ngugi's claim that he wanted "to sum up Africa of the 20th century in the context of 2,000 years of world history."

Given that Africa — where some 900 million people live in more than 50 different nations, each with its own history and culture — can hardly be treated as monolithic, one assumes Ngugi means to detect and tug at the common loose thread that has led to the unraveling of so many African states since they began claiming their independence after World War II.

And indeed it appears that's what Ngugi is doing in the book.

Limits of Tolerance

Ian Buruma's new book, Murder In Amsterdam, is a chronicle of the killing of Theo Van Gogh by a Dutch Islamist, and an examination of its effects on the political and social scene in the Netherlands. Christopher Caldwell's review in the New York Times reveals some interesting details, but unfortunately also lapses in the usual ridiculous exaggerations once has come to expect:

Buruma interviews two charismatic reformers: van Gogh’s collaborator Hirsi Ali and the Iranian-born legal scholar Afshin Ellian. Both believe that nothing short of dragging Islam through the wringer of skepticism and ridicule, as Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers did Catholicism, will suffice to disarm potential militants like Bouyeri. But Buruma is skeptical. He suspects that many of those who invoke the Enlightenment are merely defending a conservative order. “Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church,” he writes, “while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.”

That is unfair. Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him. We need a much more flexible definition of the word “minority” in a world thus networked.

The vast majority of the "billion enemies" that Caldwell is talking about here have no clue who Ayaan Hirsi Ali is. She may be famous in the Netherlands, Somalia, and in conservative circles here in the States, but that does not mean she is elsewhere in the Muslim world. In addition, most of the "billion enemies" he imagines do not yet have ready access to the Internet (must one mention the higher priorities of food, clean water, and health care?) It is doubtless that Hirsi Ali has enemies, but claiming that she risks having 1 billion of them, i.e. the entire body of Muslims, is beyond ridiculous.

Matar on Mahfouz

Hisham Matar, whose debut novel In The Country of Men, was recently longlisted for the Booker Prize, has a little vignette at the Guardian about a visit to Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo two years ago. An interesting excerpt:

I asked a question that immediately exposed me. I shouted in his ear: "How do you see writers such as myself, Arabs who write in English?" He said nothing and continued to look straight ahead. Feeling awkward in the silence I pressed on. "Do we belong to Arabic literature, or the literature of the language in which we write?" Words like "we", "belong", suddenly seemed weightless.

"A writer serves the language he writes in," Mahfouz said unequivocally.

A few of the gathered nodded in agreement.

I felt annoyed at myself, at my naked soliciting of an embrace.

I have a forthcoming essay about this very question. More soon.

September 11 Anniversary

On the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, as we remember the 3,000 American people who lost their lives, let us also remember that Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar have still not been captured, that the recommendations of the 9/11 commission have still not been implemented fully, that this nation continues to live under an "elevated" threat level, and that between 62,000 and 180,000 Iraqi people have died as a direct result of these attacks, for no reason other than that they were were nationals of a country that President Bush tried to tie to Al-Qa'ida, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And little appears to have changed on the Bush agenda; indeed, we have this very telling quote from our fearless leader: "One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq with the war on terror."

September 08, 2006

"Weight of the World"

Today between 4:30 - 5:00 pm PDT I'll be on OPB, speaking with April Baer about how we deal with world news (war, poverty, etc..). You can listen online here.

Londonstani Review

The latest issue of The Nation includes a very thoughtful review by Gary Younge of Gautam Malkani's Londonstani. Here, he addresses the much-talked about use of the 'street vernacular' in the novel:

At times this mix is playfully subversive--one character is told to "wake up, smell the masala tea"; Jas tells us Desi fathers will "drop you like a hot samosa." But it can be jarring, too. Like Forest Whitaker fumbling to maintain his English accent for the duration of The Crying Game, Malkani puts unlikely middle-class words into the narrative voice of the supposedly streetwise Jas:

Regarding it as some kind a civic duty to educate others in this basic social etiquette, he continued kickin the white kid in the face, each kick carefully planted so he din't get blood on his Nike Air Force Ones (the pair he'd bought even before Nelly released a track bout what wikid trainers they were).

It's unclear how someone who thinks in terms of "civic duty" and "basic social etiquette" can move so easily to Nelly's "wikid" sneakers; still, Malkani's overall portrait of a hybridity of races, religions, ethnicities and globalized reference points is a welcome reflection of the everyday life of London's youth.

You can read more here.

Fatwa This

For the last few years, the Wahhabi regime of Saudi Arabia has been quietly, but systematically destroying several archeological sites of religious and cultural significance to Muslims. Among these destroyed sites are: The grave of Amina bint Wahb, the Prophet's mother, which was bulldozed in 1998; the house of Khadijah, the Prophet's wife, which was demolished and replaced with lavatories; the house of Abu Bakr, the companion of the Prophet and his political successor, was destroyed in favor of a Hilton hotel. Even the birthplace of the Prophet is under threat; the Saudi government built a library around it, and now they want to destroy even those remnants and build on them.

Now, the Wahhabis are mulling whether to bar women from praying at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the world's largest pilgrimage site. The proposal is sheer misogynistic lunacy. And of course it's potentially unenforceable. I can't imagine that women pilgrims will stop turning up at the Ka'aba. But the way in which this fundamentalist sect has co-opted what should be the religious and cultural heritage of one-fifth of humanity is truly sickening.

September 06, 2006

'Twenty-Year Master Plan'

I've been hearing good things about Lawrence Wright's new book The Looming Tower. Here's an interview with him on NPR, in which he explains the influence of younger jihadis on the Web, the viral nature of their strategy, their "twenty-year master plan," and why the current approach to fight them is inadequate.