March 30, 2007

Yeazell on Lee on Wharton

The latest issue of the LRB has a review by Ruth Bernard Yeazell of Hermione Lee's new biography of Edith Wharton--a book I really want to get my hands on very soon. Here's a taste:

'My God, how does one write a Biography?’ In her magnificent study of Virginia Woolf, Lee chose to answer Woolf’s question not so much by writing a sequential narrative from cradle to grave as by offering a series of topical essays, loosely arranged by chronology and artfully composed to highlight the various aspects of her subject’s personal and imaginative history. So Virginia Woolf began with a meditation on ‘Biography’, and later chapters were as likely to address such recurrent themes as ‘Censors’ or ‘Selves’ as more obvious milestones such as ‘Marriage’ or ‘War’. Edith Wharton adopts a roughly similar method: it opens not with Wharton’s birth but with her parents’ unexpectedly witnessing revolution in the Paris of 1848, and its second chapter, ‘Making Up’, is as much a commentary on the evasions of the adult autobiographer as on the young Edith Jones’s love of storytelling. With both novelists, Lee is particularly sensitive to the gap between the life as lived and the writer’s retrospective creation of herself; and unlike many literary biographers, she is at her best when her subject’s own imaginative powers are at their height. Her readings of The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence – not to mention A Backward Glance – help to persuade one that biography is a means of enhancing literature, not reducing it.

The rest of the review is here.

March 29, 2007

The Things One Learns...

No reader of Arabic literature in translation would fail to recognize the name of translator Denys Johnson-Davies: He has worked on books by Naguib Mahfouz, Zakaria Tamer, and Tewfiq Al-Hakim, to name just a few. And he also translated Tayib Salih's masterpiece, Season of Migration to the North. So I was more than a little disappointed when I came across these pearls of wisdom in his introduction to the Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction. On the birth of the Arabic novel, he writes:

But many were the prejudices that had to be overcome. The idea of an author creating characters and making them inhabit worlds of his creation not only was foreign to the Arab Muslim mind but was even regarded as almost unacceptable. Take, for example, the ever-entertaining stories of The Thousand and One Nights. This anonymous work, so esteemed throughout the world as a masterpiece of imaginative literature, remains for most Arabs a work unworthy of serious consideration. Arab men of letters have long looked askance at the extravagances of The Arabian Nights, as the book is better known in the West, finding them suitable only for minds incapable of appreciating other forms of literature, and grudgingly admitting that the stories might have some merit only when the outside world lavished praise on them.

On the universal appeal of Arabic novels:

Many Arab writers have no experience of the outside world or of a foreign language, and their reading of world literature is confined to works translated into Arabic. Thus a reader of Mohamed El-Bisatie's A Last Glass of Tea will find that every one of its twenty-four stories takes place in villages around Lake Manzala in the Nile Delta. But readers in the West have shown themselves capable of relating to cultures that they come across for the first time in fiction, especially when captured by a master's hand.

On choosing to present the writers in the anthology by alphabetical order:

I prefer to treat the Arab world as the one cultural unit that it is.

But don't let these absurd comments discourage you from reading the anthology (which is pretty amazing) or anything he's translated (particularly Season of Migration.)

March 28, 2007

'Veiled Intolerance'

I forgot to mention last week how much I enjoyed Richard Wolin's essay in The Nation on the current malaise about Muslim citizens and immigrants in Europe. Here's a brief excerpt:

Today there are an estimated 15 million to 17 million Muslims living in Europe. Anyone who wishes to address the theme of "Europe and Islam" immediately runs up against an intractable definitional conundrum. For in Europe, the monolithic religion known as Islam is functionally nonexistent. The national origins of the European Muslim population vary dramatically from country to country. To wit: Whereas the majority of Dutch Muslims hail from Indonesia, Suriname, Morocco and Turkey, most British Muslims emigrated from the Indian subcontinent. Germany's Muslims are predominantly Turks (Turkey is, of course, a secular republic, honoring the separation of mosque and state), whereas the origins of the French Muslim community may be traced to the Maghreb, or Saharan Africa.

The French Muslim community itself is further subdivided among Arabs, Berbers (from the mountainous Kabyle region of Algeria), Africans and converts, who compose 1 percent of French Muslims. How, then, might one classify a nonobservant Kabyle immigrant who is a French citizen, born in Algeria, educated in the French school system, who speaks Amazigh at home and French at work? Is he/she Berber, Algerian, French or, qua non­observant, even veritably Muslim? Clearly, the vagaries of religion, identity and ethnicity are multifarious, rich and potentially dizzying.

You can read it all here.

March 27, 2007

Suspicion

I was walking back home through a small street where kids from a nearby high school often gather to smoke, hang out, or chat each other up. It was six o'clock, and it was already getting dark. I was thinking about my novel and not paying too much attention, when I saw two cops drive their motorcycles, tires screeching, right up in front of a teenager standing by an electricity pole. He was tall and lanky, wore jeans and a jacket, and seemed entirely harmless. One of the cops got off his bike, and told the teenager to turn out his pockets. The boy refused; the cop slapped him.

Almost instantaneously, a handful of the teenager's friends moved away to the other side of the street. I heard someone yell out loud--from a safe distance: "So this is democracy?"

When the pat-down didn't reveal anything, the policemen told the teenager he could go. Just as he started walking away, they made him turn around and walk in the opposite direction--for the hell of it. And then they sat on their motorcycles and watched.

March 26, 2007

Hope in the New York Review of Books

Pankaj Mishra reviews Hisham Matar's In The Country of Men, and my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, for the April 12 issue of the New York Review of Books The review is freely available online, here.

Short Shorts

The Guardian challenged a whole bunch of writers to come up with the shortest story possible (in the vein of Hemingway's "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Find out what Kate Atkinson, John Banville, David Lodge, Hari Kunzru, George Saunders, and many others came up with.

March 22, 2007

PEN World Voices

The organizers of the PEN World Voices festival have announced their theme and program for this year. I will be taking part in three events. Here's the first:

History and the Truth of Fiction
When: Wednesday, April 25
Where: Hemmerdinger Hall at NYU: 100 Washington Square East
What time: 1–2:30 p.m.
With Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, Michael Wallner; moderated by Colum McCann
Free and open to the public. No reservations.

The second:

Where on Earth: The Refugee Emergency
When: Thursday, April 26
Where: Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College: 695 Park Ave.
What time: 3–4:30 p.m.
With Ishmael Beah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Laila Lalami, Saadi Youssef; moderated by Russell Banks
Free and open to the public. No reservations.

And the third:

An Evening with The Moth
When: Thursday, April 26
Where: 37 Arts: 450 West 37th St.
What time: 8–10 p.m.
With Neil Gaiman, Pico Iyer, Laila Lalami; and John Hodgman as your MC
Tickets: $30 (includes wine and beer)
Purchase tickets from Ticketmaster: www.ticketmaster.com or (212) 307-4100

I know what you're wondering. And yes, I would be nervous, except I haven't left the house in four days, haven't showered in two, I'm on my fourth cup of coffee, and I am almost done with Chapter 11 of my novel. My brain is fried, and I have no room for nerves.

March 21, 2007

New Anthology

I have a story in a new anthology called X-24: Unclassified, edited by Tash Aw and Nii Ayikwei Parkes. It's a slightly older piece; I haven't written any new short fiction this year since I'm trying to focus on finishing the novel. But the book includes fantastic contributions by people like Naomi Alderman, Daniel Alarcón, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Sefi Atta, and many others, so check it out.

March 19, 2007

Reality/Fiction

I was relieved when I had to travel to Rabat for the Fulbright Symposium because it meant I would get away from the news coverage of the foiled terrorist attack in Casablanca. Last week, As Sabah published a color picture of the torn body of Abdelfettah Raydi, the 24-year-old man who blew himself up inside a cyber cafe in Sidi Moumen on March 11. Al Massae showed the second terrorist, 17-year-old Youssef Khoudri, while he was transported to Ibn Rochd Hospital. An Nass, meanwhile, printed a photo of him being stitched up. Not to be outdone, La Vie Economique did a dossier on the events, and included a photo of the severed head of Raydi.

Despite the sensationalism, the articles accompanying the photos were, for the most part, well researched and interesting. They included interviews with the man who had alerted police, with witnesses and survivors, and with the terrorists' family and neighbors. Many journalists asked why nothing had been done about the shantytowns in Sidi Moumen since the attacks of May 2003, and cautioned that more attacks remain possible so long as there is fertile ground for them. But a columnist for Aujourd'hui le Maroc fumed that "barbarians should not be pitied." (You'd think you were reading Max Boot.)

The details that have emerged certainly give pause: the seizure of 200 kg of explosives in Sidi Moumen; the fact that Raydi had already served two years of prison for suspected Salafi activities before being released in an amnesty in 2005; the claim that it took only two weeks to convince Youssef Khoudri--an illiterate mint seller and sometime drug user who lived in a one-room house with his five siblings and parents--to take part in the attack; the suggestion that the targets included the police headquarters on Zerktouni; and so on.

All this took me back to my work. Large parts of my novel are set in Sidi Moumen and it is difficult to write about something knowing not only that it could happen, but that it does happen. It's not easy to use one's imagination while at the same time grappling with a similar reality. In the end, I had to shut off the real in order to focus on the fictional; I had to stop reading the papers--at least until coverage subsides--so I can finish my novel. The symposium came at the right time.

Mess O' Potamia Is Four

The Iraq war is four years old. The BBC has an overview of the violence, in numbers.

March 14, 2007

Out: Fulbright Symposium

Posting will be light to non-existent for the next three days while I travel to Rabat for the annual Fulbright Symposium. Come again soon.

March 13, 2007

Gayle Brandeis Recommends

"Diane Schoemperlen's In the Language of Love: A Novel in 100 Chapters is structured around the 100 stimulus words from the Standard Word Association Test. Each of these words-- words like "soft", "mutton", "priest", "red", "needle", "thirsty"--becomes a jumping off place for Schoemperlen to explore the different forms of love (as child, as mother, as wife, as lover) in her character Joanna's life. While such a structure could feel like a gimmick in the wrong hands, Schoemperlen uses it to frame a strange and beautiful meditation on the wayward ways of the heart."

Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write and The Book of Dead Birds: A Novel, which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change. Her second novel, Self Storage, was recently published by Ballantine.

March 12, 2007

Foiled Attack

A suicide bomber blew himself up and injured three other people at an internet cafe in the neighborhood of Sidi Moumen, here in Casablanca. According to the BBC:

The blast happened after the man began a dispute with the cafe's owner, who refused him access to jihadist sites. Another man, with the bomber at the time of the blast, fled after the explosion but has now been arrested by police, reports say.

"The man used to come to view jihadist websites and the dispute was prompted by the internet cafe owner's decision to prevent him this time from viewing such propaganda material," one official told Reuters. Police say it is unclear if the device was detonated by design or went off by accident during the argument between the two men.

The attack took place on the anniversary of the Madrid bombings. Several news sites have put forth the theory that the bomber was at the internet cafe in order to get instructions about his target as it seems inconceivable that he would aim at a place in the slum. The investigation is still ongoing. Last week, Moroccan police arrested a suspected terrorist by the name of Saad Houssaini, who is alleged to be the "chemist" of GCIM.

March 09, 2007

NBCC Winners Announced

The National Book Critics Circle awards were announced yesterday in New York, and I was especially pleased to find out that the judges selected Kiran Desai's excellent The Inheritance of Loss. (That was the novel I voted for, by the way. None of the other books on the ballot I cast made it!) You can see a list of winners in all the categories at the NBCC blog, Critical Mass.

March 08, 2007

Critic's Response

Tom Lutz has an essay in Salon about the recent crop of books by novelists on what and how to read, which he sees as the by-product of a rift between writers and critics:

Over the past 15 years, I taught an average of a semester a year at the University of Iowa, the home of the famous Writers' Workshop. When I started the writers were on the fourth floor and the critics on the third. I often had a Workshop student or two in my graduate courses, and I would bring the creative writing faculty in to meet my undergrads. By the time I left two years ago, that had long ceased. A durable and unbreachable wall had been erected between the writers and the scholars. They looked at each other not as allies in a common project, but as enemies. Now the Workshop has moved across campus and the divorce is final.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say I have since gone over to the other side myself and teach in a creative writing program. But I still don't understand, frankly, why people hate literary scholars for having a professional vocabulary while remaining perfectly content with economists' using "devaluation" or philosophers' using "existentialist," or physicists' talking about a "projective Hilbert space endowed with the Fubini-Study metric."

You can read the piece in full here. (You'll likely have to watch an ad to access the piece, unfortunately.)

March 8

On this International Women's Day, I want to pay homage to all the Moroccan women who have worked for so long, under difficult circumstances, to bring about gender equality, justice, and progress for their country. This post is in remembrance of our ancestors and grandmothers, our pioneers: Fatima Al Fihriya, who built the world's oldest university in Fes, Al-Qarawiyyin; Touria Chaoui, who flew her plane over occupied Casablanca in order to distribute independence tracts; Malika Al Fassi, the only female signatory of the Independence Manifesto; Saida Menebhi, who died in prison for her political ideals; and all the female victims of the Years of Lead.

With admiration for the work and sacrifices of, and examples set by, Leila Abouzeid, Ghita El Khayat, Aicha Belarbi, Aziza Bennani, Fatima Benslimane, Bouchra Bernoussi, Rahma Bourquia, Zakya Daoud, Fatna El Bouih, Aicha Ech-Chenna, Nawal El Moutawakil, Nezha Hayat, Dr. Hakima Himmich, Latifa Jbabdi, Najat M'jid, Fatema Mernissi, Soumaya Naamane Guessous, Zoulikha Nasri, Halima Ouarzazi, Badia Skalli, Hinde Taarji, and all the other activists whose names do not appear here.

With respect for the men who have joined in the fight for gender equality: Mouhcine Ayouche, Abdelkader Ech-Chenna, Aziz El Ouadie, Moha Ennaji, Chakib Guessous, Lahcen Haddad, Yusuf Madad, Lekbir Ouhajou, Noureddine Saoudi, and Ahmed Zainabi.

And with hope, for the new generation.

March 07, 2007

There's A Shocker

The smiling old man in the photo on the right is General Aussaresses, and, according to Le Monde, he has recently admitted that he had FLN leader Larbi Ben M'Hidi hanged in 1957, during the Algerian war of independence. The French government has always maintained that Ben M'Hidi committed suicide. But then again what would one expect from lawmakers who, in 2007, were still having a serious debate over whether French colonization of Africa was "mostly positive"?

Photo credit: AFP/Joel Robine

R.I.P: Henri Troyat

As has been widely reported, French author Henri Troyat has died. I remember spending long summer days as a teenager reading La Lumière des justes. My sister (a big fan of historical novels) always liked him. I'll be honest, I barely remember his work now. Here's the Guardian obit.

March 06, 2007

Second Chance(s)

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, in his capacity as National Security Adviser during the Carter administration, bears a fair share of the blame for what is happening in Afghanistan, has a new book out, called Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower. As the title suggests, it's an analysis of American foreign policy under George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

In her review in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani calls the book "compelling" and says Brzezinski's analysis of the last 20 years of foreign policy is "dispassionate" and "sobering." She ends the review with a direct quote:

“Nothing could be worse for America, and eventually the world,” [Brzezinski] writes at the end of this unsparing volume, “than if American policy were universally viewed as arrogantly imperial in a postimperial age, mired in a colonial relapse in a postcolonial time, selfishly indifferent in the face of unprecedented global interdependence, and culturally self-righteous in a religiously diverse world. The crisis of American superpower would then become terminal.”

You can read the piece in full here.

Wretched Bookstores

The other day, I needed to track down a copy of Frantz Fanon's classic The Wretched of the Earth for a project I'm working on. Given the book's subject matter, and the fact that I am in a francophone country, I thought it would be simple enough. I was wrong.

Bookstore #1
Me: Good morning, could you tell me if you have Les damnés de la terre in stock?
Clerk: Les années de la terre?
Me: No, no. Damnés, you know, like damnation.
Clerk: No, we don't have it.

Bookstore #2
Me: Good morning, could you tell me if you have the book by Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre in stock?
Clerk: How do you spell the author's last name?
Me: F-
Clerk: As in Fatima?
Me: Yes. A-N-
Clerk: As in Nathalie?
Me: Uh, yes. O-N.
Clerk: Sorry, we don't have it.

Bookstore #3
Me: Good morning, could you tell me if you have the book about colonization and decolonization, Les damnés de la terre, by Frantz Fanon, F-A-N-O-N?
Clerk: Our computers are down at the moment, but I will write down the author and title and call you back, all right?
Me: Thank you.
Clerk: Okay, so you want Les damnés de la terre by Frank Fanon?

I called the Institut Français, to see if they had it. The phone rang and rang, and no one picked up.

March 05, 2007

Words Without Borders Anthology

This is great. The new Words Without Borders anthology is out, and it's called The World Through The Eyes of Writers. It includes contributions by Ma Jian, Adania Shibli, Gamal Al-Ghitani, and introductions by Jonathan Safran Foer, Anton Shammas, and Naguib Mahfouz, among many, many others. I was delighted to see my friend Randa Jarrar had done some translation work for them, with a piece by Iraqi writer Jabbar Yassin Hussein. Check it out.

(via.)

Yasmina Khadra's The Attack

This weekend I tried reading Yasmina Khadra's The Attack, translated by John Cullen. Khadra, you may recall, is the pseudonym of Algerian novelist (and ex army officer) Mohamed Moulessehoul. While his earlier work was set in his native Algeria, The Swallows of Kabul was set in Afghanistan, The Attack is set in Israel, and his latest, The Sirens of Baghdad, is set in Iraq. (By the way, do you think his next one will be set in Iran? With a title like The Sparrows of Tehran?)

The Attack is about a successful Arab Israeli surgeon named Amin Jaafari who works to save the many victims of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, only to discover that his wife Sihem was behind the terrorist attack. Let's just say I couldn't get very far into the novel. I thought it relied too much on cliché both in terms of character development, and in terms of the language itself (e.g., "The eyes in [a sheikh] ascetic's face glinted like the blade of a scimitar.")

March 01, 2007

Reading: Casablanca, Morocco

I've been invited by the Moroccan American Circle to do a reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. The event will take place tonight at the Churchill Club here in Casablanca. Details:

7:00 PM - 10:30 PM
Reading & Discussion to be followed by drinks and tapas
Churchill Club
1 rue de la Méditerannée
Aïn Diab, Casablanca
(Admission 100dh)

(The reading and discussion will be in English. ) Hope to see you there!

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My Events

04.26: LA Times Festival of Books
04.30: Claremont, California
09.23-10.04: International Literature Festival Berlin

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