April 23, 2008

Xujun Eberlein's Apologies Forthcoming

As I'm sure you've realized by now, I'm spending much of this week chatting up some of my friends' books. Today, I was hoping you would take a look at Apologies Forthcoming, Xujun Eberlein's debut collection of short stories. Eberlein is an M.I.T-trained engineer who started writing in Chinese, but switched to English after moving to the United States in 1988. Her stories and personal essays have been published in Agni, StoryQuarterly, and Kwani, among other magazines. They often feature characters struggling with the effect of China's cultural revolution. Her collection of stories, which won the Tartt Fiction Prize last year, is due out in May.

April 22, 2008

Mary Akers's Radical Gratitude

Yesterday, I mentioned Mark Sarvas's debut novel, so today I'd like to give a shout-out to my friend Mary Akers, a novelist and short story writer from New York. She just published her first book, Radical Gratitude, a memoir co-written with Andrew Bienkowski, about his experiences in Siberia, where he and his family were exiled during Stalin's rule. The book has done very well in Australia (it's already on a second printing there) and is due out in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere very soon. You can read some of Akers's work in the Bellevue Literary Review, the Wisconsin Review, and Brevity.

April 21, 2008

Mark Sarvas's Harry, Revised

My friend Mark Sarvas has just published his first novel, Harry, Revised. It's about a recently widowed man who finds love at the most unexpected of times, and has to reinvent himself in order to win the woman for whom he's fallen. I read it when it was still in draft form, and I really liked how it dealt with the subject of grief without being stern or preachy. I admired the fact that it's a very sympathetic and complex look at a pretty pathetic man. And, of course, it's full of humor. Now that Harry, Revised is finally out in bookstores, I'm looking forward to reading the final version. Sarvas will be going on book tour at the end of the month, so check out his website for dates.

March 20, 2008

How to Read A Novel

Lately, there's been a veritable a deluge of books on how to read. (See Reading Like A Writer; Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, even How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read.) It seems writers and critics are worried that the art of reading is becoming passé.

The other day, at the dentist, the technician asked how come my appointment was in the middle of the morning. "I have a flexible schedule," I said.
"What do you do?" she asked.
"I'm a writer."
"Oh, wow. So, like, you have a book?"
"Yes, I do."
"So is it at, like, Costco?"
I wasn't so much startled by the mention of a big chain like Costco as I was that the first question about the book was its store placement rather than its content. Everyone buys books. Who reads them, though?

So books like John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel, which came out last fall and which I started reading two days ago, seem necessary to me. This is meant for the general reader who may not always be aware of what is going on in the world of books, but there are some juicy literary tidbits, too. I love the examples he uses to make his points. For instance, to highlight divergent reader reactions, he brings up Disgrace--I can't tell you how many arguments I've had about that novel with people. Occasionally, though, his sense of humor reminds me of my dad's. (Commenting on the popularity of iPods, he says "Head implants, doubtless, are on the way, for the dedicated music lover. Seattle is working on it." Har, har, Dad.) Still, his love for books comes across on every page, so even if you didn't already love books, you'd love them by the time you were done with this tome.

January 14, 2008

Elias Khoury's Yalo

My review of Elias Khoury's new novel, Yalo, appeared on the cover of Sunday's edition of the L. A. Times Book Review. The piece also makes mention of two of Khoury's earlier books, Little Mountain and City Gates, which have just recently been re-issued. Here's an excerpt:

Few cities have withstood the kind of violence and carnage that Beirut has. Though destroyed by a civil war lasting 15 long years, it seemed to be on the verge of an economic and cultural renaissance in 2006 when it was bombed again during the Israeli invasion. Beirut is a city that has learned to start over, to rebuild itself on top of its ruins, but it is also a place where memories are long and myths are persistent. In his new novel, "Yalo," Elias Khoury grapples with the idea of truth and memory, what we choose to remember and what we prefer to forget. In fact, "Yalo" is composed of confessions -- whether forced or voluntary, true or laced with self-aggrandizement, redemptive for the confessor or entirely useless.

The rest of the review is freely available on the L.A. Times website.

January 04, 2008

Sinan Antoon's I'jaam

My review of Sinan Antoon's debut novel, I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, appears in the January 21 issue of The Nation magazine. Here is how it opens:

Legend has it that in the eleventh century, when the very eccentric and possibly demented Caliph El Hakim needed some money, he wrote a letter to the governor of Jerusalem asking that a tax be levied. The governor wrote back that this was impossible--most of the people were poor, many of them monks who lived in caves in Wad er-Rabâbeh. El Hakim asked his scribe to write a letter with the command "Count the men." Whether the scribe made a mistake or whether the letter was intercepted, no one really knows. But by the time the letter arrived in Jerusalem it read "Castrate the men." In Arabic, the difference between the two verbs hasaa and khasaa is a single dot.

The history of the Arabic language is full of such tales, in which a dot can change the meaning of a word entirely. In fact, the original Arabic alphabet consisted of consonant letters only, some of which corresponded to multiple sounds.

And it is that aspect of the language that Antoon's novel exploits, to great literary effect. You can read the review here.

November 21, 2007

On Joan Scott's The Politics of the Veil

The December 10 issue of The Nation magazine is its annual Fall Books issue, so it's a particular delight for those of us who like to read books, and read about them, too. There are pieces on Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, among many others.

The magazine also includes an essay of mine about the headscarf controversies in France. It's called "Beyond the Veil." Here is its opening paragraph:

"A kind of aggression." "A successor to the Berlin Wall." "A lever in the long power struggle between democratic values and fundamentalism." "An insult to education." "A terrorist operation." These descriptions--by former French President Jacques Chirac; economist Jacques Attali; and philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann--do not refer to the next great menace to human civilization but rather to the Muslim woman's headscarf, which covers the hair and neck, or, as it is known in France, the foulard islamique.

In her keenly observed book The Politics of the Veil, historian Joan Wallach Scott examines the particular French obsession with the foulard, which culminated in March 2004 with the adoption of a law that made it illegal for students to display any "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation. The law further specified that the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap and large crosses were not to be worn but that "medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, and small Korans" were permitted. Despite the multireligious contortions, it was very clear, of course, that the law was primarily aimed at Muslim schoolgirls.

The rest of the article is freely available online, here.

October 25, 2007

Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying and Cion

My review of Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying and Cion appears in the November 12 issue of The Nation, but the piece is already available online. I wrote this back in August, but my editor at the magazine left to join the LRB, so it took a little while to get the piece through with the transition. Here's an excerpt:

Over his long and prolific career, South African writer Zakes Mda has produced plays, novels and stories that explore very different characters, eras and landscapes. In Ways of Dying, two childhood friends from a small village in South Africa reconnect decades later in an unnamed city, their relationship fulfilled only when they reconcile with their painful past. In The Heart of Redness, villagers in the Eastern Cape fight over whether to celebrate or denigrate the legacy of a nineteenth-century teenager who prophesied that if the Xhosa people killed their cattle and burned their crops, the ancestors would be resurrected to defeat the British colonizers. The Madonna of Excelsior chronicles the coming of age of a South African woman whose mother and father were tried in 1971 under the Immorality Act for having interracial sex. Mda's latest book, Cion, is set in a small town in Ohio that once provided refuge for runaway slaves. It features a cast of characters who struggle with how to fit this important historical fact into their lives, their relationships and even their art. The connecting thread in all these novels seems to be the unresolved presence of the past. It hovers like a ghost, at once forbidding and inviting, seductive and terrifying, depressing and inspiring.

Mda is deeply concerned with how people remember the past, how they use it to shape the present, how they call upon it to fashion modern selves, modern identities--and how in the process they run the risk of exploiting or sentimentalizing it. Given Mda's life story, which is marked by all the major events of his country, one can see why he has such a keen interest in history.

More here.

October 12, 2007

Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher

On the plane back from Europe, I read Tom Perrotta’s new novel, The Abstinence Teacher, which I believe comes out next week in the U.S.. It’s very similar to Little Children in its structure: alternating chapters take us into the minds of a man and a woman, with diametrically opposed lives, and yet of course strikingly similar flaws. The title character in The Abstinence Teacher is Ruth Ramsey, a recently divorced high-school sex-education teacher who runs into trouble with members of an evangelical church. They complain to the school board, the school board sides with the concerned parents, and a new, abstinence-only curriculum is introduced. The other protagonist is Tim Mason, the soccer coach. He’s a drug addict and an alcoholic who only managed to get clean and sober when he found Jesus, and he is a member of the church that forced the abstinence curriculum on Ruth. Tim is riddled with doubts, though, jealous of his ex-wife's new husband, and generally having a hard time finding anything in common with his new, church-approved wife.

Given the frightening influence of the Christian right on current U.S. policies in education, public health, and foreign affairs, it’s really refreshing to see a novelist tackle the theme of fundamentalism. (And if you doubt for one minute the wide influence of fundamentalists, just look at what the nutty Ann Coulter recently said about Jews, and at the campaign the equally nutty David Horowitz is mounting on university campuses.) Perrotta does a good job of placing his characters in difficult situations, and his satirical eye is devastatingly sharp. I found the novel engrossing, and ended up staying up to finish it even though I was exhausted when I got off the plane. I did have a couple of issues with the book, though. For instance, the continual mention of brand names grew tiring after a while; nearly each product name was shorthand for a character trait, and consumer choices don’t go very far in drawing out character.

October 01, 2007

Camus' L'étranger

On the plane to Orlando, I re-read, for the first time since I was fourteen years old, Albert Camus' L'étranger. I remembered some passages from the novel so well I could have recited them (C'est alors que tout a vacillé etc.) My unease with the book as a teenager did not change, though, and in fact it grew worse. Meursault's killing of the character referred to simply as "the Arab," the complete absence of any dialogue from the three Arab men who confront Raymond and Meursault on the beach, the fact that the only Arab character who says anything is Raymond's abused and oppressed girlfriend, the absence of the Arab man's family or any Arab witnesses at the trial: these are not coincidences, naturally, but clear narrative choices Camus made. One might argue that Meursault's fight with the chaplain and his realization at the end are an assertion of the Self in the face of an indifferent universe and a moralizing society, but I think that assertion about the absurdity of life comes by way of victimizing the Other. Camus gives us a vision of the world that leaves nothing to compassion, emotion, or humanity.

September 07, 2007

M.G. Vassanji's The Assassin's Song

My review of M.G. Vassanji's new novel The Assassin's Song appeared in last weekend's Chicago Tribune. Here's the opening paragraph:

In February 2002, a group of Hindu demonstrators converged on the town of Ayodhya, India, to demand that a temple be built on the site of the Babri Masjid, a 16th Century mosque that had been destroyed a decade earlier. On their way back from the rally, their train stopped in the city of Godhra, in Gujarat state, where a group of Muslims standing on the platform allegedly heckled them. Part of the train carrying the Hindu demonstrators caught fire, and nearly 60 people were killed.

The deaths -- which new evidence suggests may have been caused by a cooking stove inside the train car -- led to months-long attacks on the state's entire Muslim minority. As many as 2,000 people were murdered. Muslim women were raped and burned alive, and their babies were torn from their wombs. Using voter lists, mobs targeted and looted Muslim businesses. By the time the killings stopped, 150,000 Muslims had been displaced.

The sheer viciousness and depressing regularity of communal riots in Gujarat make it an unlikely setting for a novel about a mystical saint who transcends religious identity, yet that is where M.G. Vassanji places the action in his new novel, "The Assassin's Song." Alternating chapters tell the stories of Karsan Dargawalla, an Indian college professor who returns home to Gujarat after having spent long years abroad, and Nur Fazal, a 13th Century Sufi Muslim who arrives in Gujarat seeking refuge with the Hindu king, Vishal Dev. Karsan is Nur's descendant, his successor -- and his avatar.

You can read the review in full here.

June 06, 2007

Zakya Daoud's Les Années Lamalif

I am reading Zakya Daoud's new book, Les Années Lamalif. 1958-1988. Trente ans de journalisme au Maroc. Daoud is a fascinating person, and one hopes that a proper biography will someday be devoted to her. Born Jacqueline David in a small town in Normandy, she went to journalism school in Paris. There, she met Mohammed Loghlam, whom she married and followed to Casablanca in 1958, after the completion of their degrees. Loghlam applied formally for Moroccan citizenship (he was born in Casablanca to a Moroccan mother and an Algerian father), for himself and for their son, but when the citizenship papers came through, they included Jacqueline's as well, even though she never asked for them. This clerical error resulted in her becoming one of very few naturalized Moroccans. Later on, the editor of Jeune Afrique suggested that she take on a pseudonym when she started writing for him, and that was how Jacqueline David became Zakya Daoud. Years later, her detractors still used her foreign birth to criticize her and to deny her the right to speak out on any number of political issues in Morocco. The wound of being called "nesranya" is very raw still, as her many references to it in the book attest.

Les Années Lamalif is a chronicle of Daoud's work as a journalist at various organizations in Morocco, including the Radio Télévision Marocaine, and all the difficulties that such work entailed, including several vicious altercations with Moulay Ahmed Alaoui, the imprisonment of many friends or acquaintances, the constant threat of censorship. In 1966, using all their savings, Daoud and Loghlam founded Lamalif , which would later become a reference for many in the opposition movement. Daoud published the work of Abdallah Laroui, Mohammed Tozy, Paul Pascon, and many others. It's very clear that this was a period not just of political upheaval, but also of great cultural and literary activity. There are a few gossipy tidbits (e.g. How the Souffles group became upset when a Lamalif article by a young Salim Jay ridiculed a reading by some of their poets.) There are also disturbing anecdotes (e.g. Daoud being required to go to the local commissariat regularly to be questioned about matters of public knowledge.) Most of all, Les Années Lamalif is a rigorous account of all the work that went into contesting the established power structure, into saying No to the Makhzen's domination.

Although the book is exceedingly interesting, it suffers occasionally from a tendency to list series of events rather than placing them in a narrative, whether personal or historical. This may be due to the fact that Daoud's journals were stolen from her by Moroccan security on a flight to Paris in 1988, so she had no access to her personal notes from those years, and had to rely instead on memory, documentation, and research. Still, this is an important book, a reference for the younger generation. May they read it and draw the necessary parallels.

May 22, 2007

Colum McCann's Zoli

I picked up a copy of Colum McCann's new novel, Zoli, when I was in New York for the PEN festival, on the recommendation of a couple of friends, including my editor at Algonquin. The story begins in the 1930s, when a young Roma girl named Marienka (nicknamed Zoli) loses her entire family in an attack by Hlinka guards. (Fascist attacks against such minorities were common in Czechoslovakia at the time.) Zoli escapes with her grandfather, and together they join a kumpanija, a traveling group of Romani musicians. Zoli's extraordinary ability to remember and to write songs and poems soon attracts notice--from Swann, an expat translator, and Stransky, a Slovak poet and editor. Zoli's growing fame is quickly co-opted by the Communists, who want to make of her a poster child of Romani "integration" in a new society. The novel explores questions of belonging--national, cultural, linguistic--as well as class and ideology, without ever once slipping into a harangue. A rare feat these days. McCann immersed himself in Roma culture to write this novel, and the care with which he draws this world is palpable. He breathes life into very different characters, giving them each the space in which to tell their story. A great book.

May 09, 2007

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

A father and son walk along a road in a post-apocalyptic future. Around them, everything is dead or dying. Between sunup and sundown, the sky's color changes by only a few shades of gray. It's numbingly cold, and ash falls from the sky nearly all the time. The reader is never told what could have caused the world to turn out like this, but it's not hard to imagine that it could be a nuclear explosion. In the end, it doesn't much matter what caused it all, because there is life to attend to. The little boy needs to be fed and protected, and the father devotes himself to that. There are other survivors, but it's hard to tell who "the good guys" are, those "who carry the fire." McCarthy ventures into the deepest, darkest recesses of the human heart, and chronicles what he sees in vivid, yet restrained prose. Some survivors engage in cannibalism; others have organized in armies, red scarves at their necks, killing and stealing and rampaging; slavery reappears; and through all this madness the father must find food and protect his little boy. I had to put this book down a couple of times because I was not sure I could finish it. But I cared about the characters far too much to stay away, and so I picked it up again and finished it in one sitting. What Cormac McCarthy has done in his new novel is difficult, brave, and incredibly well-executed. A masterpiece.

May 04, 2007

Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking

I've had a copy of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking for a long, long while, and I finally got to read it last week, on the plane to New York. It's her memoir of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of a massive heart attack while their only daughter, Quintana, was in the hospital, receiving treatment for septic shock. (After the book was completed, but before its publication, Quintana passed away, in an almost unbearable post scriptum.) Didion chronicles the process of grief and mourning with stunning clarity, and many times I was moved to tears and had to put the book down. But there were also moments when I was frustrated by the sheer amount of control in the prose, as if the words could somehow serve as refuge from things Didion might not want the reader to know.

April 20, 2007

Mohsin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist

I went to Rabat to pick up my mail at the Fulbright office today, and I found several packages waiting for me. In the lot was a copy of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I started reading on the train back home. The story is told through a monologue by a young Pakistani man, sitting across from an American stranger in the Old Anarkali neighborhood of Lahore. I am enthralled by it so far, and hope it can deliver on its promise in the end.

Updated to say that I thought the second half of the book didn't hold as well as the first half. Changez's transformation from a successful analyst to a disgruntled slack is not earned, I'm afraid. It fits the plot, but doesn't fit the character. I did like this book a lot, though, for other reasons. I could see the influence of Tayib Salih and Joseph Conrad, and if I were not so completely busy with my own novel, I think I would have written about The Reluctant Fundamentalist at great length.

March 05, 2007

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.")

February 20, 2007

Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age

I just finished reading Tahmima Anam's first book, A Golden Age, a historical novel set during the Bangladeshi war of independence. It follows a young widow named Rehana, as she tries to keep her small family--her son Sohail, and her daughter Maya--together through the horror of the 1971 war with Pakistan. A Golden Age has one of the best opening chapters I've read in a while, and so it was good to see it included in the latest issue of Granta magazine (Granta 96: War Zones).

February 12, 2007

Pramoedya's It's Not An All Night Fair

Pramoedya Ananta Toer's It's Not And All Night Fair is one of those books where very little happens--a man travels from Jakarta to his home village in Java to see his father, who is fatally ill--and yet I couldn't put it down. It paints the portrait of a complex father-son relationship in modern-day Indonesia. The father fought for independence from the Dutch, chose to stay in his village, and has clung to his ideals, while the narrator has only known the corrupt rule of Sukarno, has moved to the big city, and is mostly preoccupied with making it. Once, the father had been offered a chance to join a local assembly, which would have meant he could have become part of the ruling elite, but he refused the appointment: "The local assembly is only a stage. And I don't fancy becoming a clown--even a big clown." By contrast, the son worries about the cost of everything, and describes his salary as being " only enough to allow you to go on breathing." We get a picture of a country in which hopes of a better life after independence have been dashed, and where the older man has more aspirations than the younger one. The prose is very plain, but the images are striking. On a long evening, for example, we are told that "the night outside went on swallowing the span of men's lives." The book stayed with me.

It's Not And All Night Fair was originally published in 1951, translated from Bahasa Indonesia by C.W. Watson in 1973, and finally released in the United States last fall.

January 17, 2007

Marjane Satrapi's Chicken with Plums

My review of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Chicken with Plums appears in today's Boston Globe. Here's an excerpt:

It shouldn't come as a surprise to Satrapi's many dedicated fans that she has mined her family's rich history again. In "Persepolis," she told of her coming of age in Iran, during the Islamic Revolution and the long, bloody war with Iraq. In "Persepolis 2," she wrote of her teenage life in Austria, where her parents sent her so she could finish high school away from the constant harassments of the mullahs. In "Embroideries," she recounted an afternoon tea party at her grandmother's house, and used it to create an eye-opening portrait of sexual relations in modern-day Iran. Now she gives us the story of her great-uncle, turning it into a meditation on art and love, and the necessity of both to any life worth living.

You can read it all here.

January 05, 2007

Fouad Laroui's Refutation

One of the pleasures of living in Casablanca is having easy access to books by Moroccan writers (or indeed by anyone who writes in Arabic or French or anyone translated in these languages.) So when I heard that Fouad Laroui had a new book out, an essay collection titled De L'islamisme, I popped into the Carrefour des Livres to pick up a copy. They were sold out. No problem, I thought, and I went over to Livre Service. They were sold out, too. I had to call two or three other bookstores before I could locate one copy (one!) at Gauthier Livres. (Coincidentally, the last remaining copy was set up next to a stack of The Caged Virgin by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)

I stayed up until midnight last night to finish De L'islamisme. It's enormously readable, it has lots of humor (just like Laroui's novels), and it manages to bring a few fresh perspectives on a topic that has been beaten half to death. Laroui's background in science also comes in handy as he deconstructs some of the ridiculous claims made by religious extremists, crackpot scientists, and other assorted imbeciles. My one complaint about the book is that it does not have source notes or a bibliography. For instance, Laroui writes things like "Voici ce que nous dit un commentateur," but doesn't always say who he has in mind, and I am not so well-read as to figure it out each time. I need names, dates, publications! It's otherwise a very enjoyable book, a well-crafted mix of memoir and objective analysis that never gets precious or heavy.

January 03, 2007

Ahdaf Soueif's I Think Of You

Ahdaf Soueif's new book, a collection of short stories titled I Think Of You, comes out in March in the United States. I was slightly disappointed when I found out that the pieces in this book have all been previously published, either in Soueif's first collection Aicha (1983), or in her second, Sandpiper (1996). Those books were not published in the United States, though, and in any case they are somewhat hard to find through online booksellers, so this new collection, which culls the best stories from both, makes perfect sense. I recommend, in particular, the stories "1964," "I Think Of You," and "Sandpiper."

December 05, 2006

On My Nightstand

This week I am reading C. R. Pennell's Morocco Since 1830. The text could have used a more thorough editing (pronoun references are a bit sloppy, for instance) but I am finding the book very instructive. It's also depressing, quite frankly, to read about the period during which the country fell slowly and surely under foreign control. I hope to finish it this week, and move on to something a bit more literary.

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.

July 31, 2006

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

My review of Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, appeared in the Boston Globe this past weekend. Here is an excerpt:

Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" is a brilliant and bittersweet graphic memoir that chronicles the author's relationship with her formidably troubled father, Bruce. The book takes its title from the funeral home that Bruce inherited and ran. In his spare time, he restored the family's 1867 Gothic Revival house. Giving a semblance of life to dead bodies and returning its lost splendor to an old home -- Bruce was obviously obsessed with appearances. "He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not," Bechdel writes. The deceit lasts for many years; only when Bechdel is in college does she find out that her father is gay.

You can read the rest here.

July 19, 2006

Reading List

I was only about thirty pages into Hisham Matar's In The Country of Men, and was looking forward to the rest, when somehow I managed to leave my copy under my seat on the plane from London. So now I am back to my summer reading list. I'm well into Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, and enjoying it tremendously. At first, I was slightly put off by the jagged narrative, but Desai's observations are so sharp and her voice so clear that I quickly got past that and I am now having a great time. A marvelous piece of work. More on it soon, I hope.

June 01, 2006

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin &
Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam Today

Thanks to Christopher Hitchens' column in Slate, we have all heard about Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "arresting and hypnotizing beauty" and we have been urged "to go out and buy" The Caged Virgin. But if you'd rather read a critical review of the book, perhaps you might be interested in my essay in the June 19th issue of The Nation. The piece is about the ever-popular topic of "Women and Islam"™ and specifically addresses Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin and Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam Today. Here's an excerpt:

These days, being a Muslim woman means being saddled with what can only be referred to as the "burden of pity." The feelings of compassion that we Muslim women seem to inspire emanate from very distinct and radically opposed currents: religious extremists of our own faith, and evangelical and secular supporters of empire in the West.

Radical Islamist parties claim that the family is the cornerstone of society and that women, by virtue of their reproductive powers, are its builders. An overhaul of society must therefore begin with reforming the status of women, and in particular with distinguishing clearly their roles from those of men. Guided by their "true" interpretations of the faith, these radicals want women to resume their traditional roles of nurturers and men to be empowered to lead the family. If we protect women's rights in Islam, they assure us, the umma, the community of believers, will be lifted from its general state of poverty and backwardness.

Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), the Egyptian writer and activist who has exerted such a powerful influence over the radical Islamist movement, fervently believed that Muslim women belonged in the home. In his 1964 book Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones), Qutb wrote that "if woman is freed from her basic responsibility of bringing up children" and, whether on her own or by pressure from society, seeks to work in jobs such as "a hostess or a stewardess in a hotel or ship or air company," she will be "using her ability for material productivity rather than the training of human beings." This, he claimed, would make the entire civilization "backward." The misogynistic philosophy has proved enticing, finding advocates among Muslims throughout the world. Between 1989 and 1991, for instance, Abbassi Madani, the red-bearded founder of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front Party (FIS), often referred to women who refused to cover themselves with a hijab as "sparrow hawks of neocolonialism." His co-founder, Ali Belhadj, claimed that there was a simple solution to the country's high unemployment rate: turn over the jobs of working women to idle men. Madani summarized his program: "The system is sick; the doctor is FIS; and the medicine has existed for fourteen centuries. It is Islam." Reducing Algerian women to birds of prey, and their faith to a pill: These are good indicators of the depth of intellect within the leadership of the FIS.

Meanwhile, the abundant pity that Muslim women inspire in the West largely takes the form of impassioned declarations about "our plight"--reserved, it would seem, for us, as Christian and Jewish women living in similarly constricting fundamentalist settings never seem to attract the same concern. The veil, illiteracy, domestic violence, gender apartheid and genital mutilation have become so many hot-button issues that symbolize our status as second-class citizens in our societies. These expressions of compassion are often met with cynical responses in the Muslim world, which further enrages the missionaries of women's liberation. Why, they wonder, do Muslim women not seek out the West's help in freeing themselves from their societies' retrograde thinking? The poor things, they are so oppressed they do not even know they are oppressed.

The sympathy extended to us by Western supporters of empire is nothing new. In 1908 Lord Cromer, the British consul general in Egypt, declared that "the fatal obstacle" to the country's "attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization" was Islam's degradation of women. The fact that Cromer raised school fees and discouraged the training of women doctors in Egypt, and in England founded an organization that opposed the right of British women to suffrage, should give us a hint of what his views on gender roles were really like. Little seems to have changed in the past century, for now we have George W. Bush, leader of the free world, telling us, before invading Afghanistan in 2001, that he was doing it as much to free the country's women as to hunt down Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Five years later, the Taliban are making a serious comeback, and the country's new Constitution prohibits any laws that are contrary to an austere interpretation of Sharia. Furthermore, among the twenty-odd reasons that were foisted on the American public to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, of course, the subjugation of women; this, despite the fact that the majority of Iraqi women were educated and active in nearly all sectors of a secular public life. Three years into the occupation, the only enlightened aspect of Saddam's despotic rule has been dismantled: Facing threats from a resurgent fundamentalism, both Sunni and Shiite, many women have been forced to quit their jobs and to cover because not to do so puts them in harm's way. Why Mr. Bush does not advocate for the women of Thailand, the women of Botswana or the women of Nepal is anyone's guess.

This context--competing yet hypocritical sympathies for Muslim women--helps to explain the strong popularity, particularly in the post-September 11 era, of Muslim women activists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji and the equally strong skepticism with which they are met within the broad Muslim community. These activists are passionate and no doubt sincere in their criticism of Islam. But are their claims unique and innovative, or are they mostly unremarkable? Are their conclusions borne out by empirical evidence, or do they fail to meet basic levels of scholarship? The casual reader would find it hard to answer these questions, because there is very little critical examination of their work. For the most part, the loudest responses have been either hagiographic profiles of these "brave" and "heroic" women, on the one hand, or absurd and completely abhorrent threats to the safety of these "apostates" and "enemies of God," on the other.

You can read the rest of the review here.

May 30, 2006

Meg Mullins' The Rug Merchant

My review of Meg Mullins' The Rug Merchant appeared in the Washington Post Book World this past weekend. Here's an excerpt:

The Rug Merchant is based on a short story by the same name that appeared in the Iowa Review and was later anthologized in Best American Short Stories (2002). The delicate, subtle style that highlighted that work can frequently be found in the novel. But the long form also reveals shortcomings in the consistency of the narrator's voice. In addition, Mullins appears to have trouble creating full lives for her characters. Although we hear that Ushman has a successful business, we never see him interact with any clients except Mrs. Roberts. He never chats with a neighbor, doesn't meet any friends, doesn't have any employees. Indeed, the only relationships he appears to have are those that serve the plot.

The Rug Merchant chronicles one man's relationship with two very different women -- one a friend, the other a lover -- and the more successful rendering is the least romantic. Ushman's friendship with Mrs. Roberts reveals a darker and affecting side to both of them, a touch that remains missing from the love affair with Stella. This imbalance makes the world that Mullins has created engaging, but not fully rewarding.

You can read it in full here.

March 07, 2006

Amitav Ghosh's Incendiary Circumstances

My review of Amitav Ghosh's Incendiary Circumstances appeared in the Sunday Oregonian. Here's an excerpt:

Amitav Ghosh's latest book, Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times, is a collection of essays -- reportage, political commentary, travel articles and even a few pieces of literary criticism. (Don't run, this is actually pretty good.) The essays were written over a period of nearly 20 years, and the book opens with the most recent, "The Town by the Sea," which describes Ghosh's trip to the Andaman Islands only a few days after the tsunami struck South Asia in December of 2004. It closes with the oldest, "The Imam and the Indian," in which Ghosh writes of how he engaged in a game of verbal bidding with an imam over which of their countries, Egypt or India, is the rightful heir to the West in terms of "guns and tanks and bombs."

The unifying theme here is the question that looms over writers in this age, or any other age, for that matter: how to write about the world, about its turmoil and violence, without "allowing your work to become complicit with the subject." The only answer, Ghosh suggests, is for "those who deal in words [to] pay scrupulous attention to what they say."

Read the rest of it here.

March 06, 2006

Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Last Friend

My review of Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Last Friend appears in the March 20th issue of The Nation. Here is the opening paragraph:

In 1966 the Moroccan intellectual Abdellatif Laabi launched a cultural revolution in the form of a magazine. A bilingual quarterly, Souffles (Breaths) featured the work of leading figures of the North African literary and political avant-garde, such as novelist Mohammed Khair-Eddine, poet Mostafa Nissaboury and leftist activist Abraham Serfaty. Before long, it became the principal reference for a homegrown progressive movement. In his role as editor, Laabi was the first to publish many of the region's young writers. Among these was a 24-year-old poet and philosophy professor named Tahar Ben Jelloun, who made a stirring debut in the magazine in 1968 with "L'Aube des dalles" (The Dawn of Stones). In this haunting meditation on repression, Ben Jelloun courageously evoked the need to remember victims of disappearance and torture: "And this man, this man who never returned/a body/that was dissolved in sulfuric acid/a body/that was sunk in quicklime/what will/the wind tell erosion/what will/the sword tell the torn neck/when/it will be necessary to remember this man." Because of poems like "L'Aube des dalles," which directly addressed the deteriorating political situation, the Moroccan government banned Souffles in 1971.

For more on Ben Jelloun, his new book, and its place in contemporary Moroccan literature, read the full review here. (The article is freely available to non-subscribers.)

January 23, 2006

Vikram Seth's Two Lives

My review of Vikram Seth's Two Lives appears in Sunday's Boston Globe. Part memoir, part biography, the book tells the story of Seth's uncle Shanti, a World War II veteran who settled in London, and Shanti's German wife, Henny. Here is an excerpt:

Although Seth did an enormous amount of research for this book, the reader never gets very close to the inscrutable Henny. Seth's only sources for drawing this intriguing, mysterious woman are his and his uncle's memories of her, as well as her correspondence. But Henny's letters are, by her friends' own admission, rather distant, leaving Seth to speculate on her frame of mind, on her feelings for the German fiancé who abandoned her and for the man whom she married. Because Seth never interviewed her during her lifetime (one gets the sense she would have been too private to want to speak about such things) the resulting portrait doesn’t quite satisfy.

You can read the full review here. (You may be asked to register, in which case you can use bugmenot to get a free login.)

October 03, 2005

Zadie Smith's On Beauty

My long-promised review of Zadie Smith's On Beauty appeared in the Sunday Oregonian. Here's an excerpt:

Smith's ear for dialogue remains one of her strongest skills as a writer. She is able to capture not just different accents or different registers, but also register switches within a character's speech. Kiki, for example, sounds slightly different when she addresses her husband and children than when she talks to Claire, a prominent poet whose admirers Zora spitefully refers to as "Cult-of-Claire groupies."

As in "White Teeth" and in the opening chapter of "The Autograph Man," Smith's depiction of fathers is well-observed and compelling, even tender. For all his philandering, his self-obsession, his over-intellectualizing, Howard remains lovable. "On Beauty" is itself an act of appreciation of beauty. A longtime E.M. Forster fan, Smith has structured her novel as an homage to "Howards End," complete with similar opening lines, inherited houses, troublesome bequests and unexpected philandering.

At times, however, Smith strains under the weight of all the concerns she tries to address: The politics of academia, familial and personal identity, body image, campus life, ideological wars, etc. The result can seem somewhat unfocused, though far from lacking in beauty.

For those of you in Portland, mark your calendars: Zadie Smith will appear on Thursday, October 6th at a Powell's event. (Note that the reading will be held at the First Unitarian Church. Come early...)

September 12, 2005

Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown

My review of Salman Rushdie's new novel, Shalimar the Clown, appeared in the Sunday Oregonian. Here's a snippet:

Despite all the political turmoil around him, Shalimar's embrace of the fundamentalists is not an ideological choice but a personal one. His wife's betrayal turns him into a killing machine, and he willfully joins with a group that can satiate his hunger for revenge while he awaits the right moment to strike. The trouble with Shalimar, Rushdie suggests, is that he values his honor more than his life -- indeed, more than the lives of others. In so doing, he becomes part of the war that results in the destruction of his father's dream, the artistic legacy of Pachigam and its multicultural way of life. Taking the reader from wartime Strasbourg to Bombay, from London to Los Angeles, from the valleys of Kashmir to Algeria, Rushdie weaves a tale in which all these characters, Muslims and Hindus, Jews and Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists, are ultimately connected. Their failure to understand this simple fact threatens them all.

"Shalimar the Clown" is a wonderful example of Rushdie's trademark ability to mix high and low culture, to quote bits of Baudelaire as well as scenes from "The Magnificent Seven," to describe the Indian legend of Anarkali as well as the regulars at Jimmy Fish's boxing club in Santa Monica, Calif. As a prose stylist, Rushdie is in fine form here, his delicate sentences seamlessly taking the reader from English to Urdu and back. Add to this the characteristic humor and unflinching observation of a master storyteller, and you have Rushdie's best work in many years.

You can read the full text here.

September 09, 2005

Abdulrazak Gurnah's Desertion

My review of Abdulrazak Gurnah's Desertion appears in the September 26 issue of The Nation. I have talked about the novel several times on Moorishgirl, but this (longer) piece was an opportunity to critically examine it and put it in context with other works by Gurnah. The review is available to subscribers only online. Here's a snippet:

The desertion of the title should, by now, be fairly straightforward. White men desert their native lovers, Muslim men desert liberated partners, and young, educated men desert Zanzibar for the comforts of Britain. But there is another kind of desertion that haunts the novel: the British colonial experience. Indeed, Gurnah seems to suggest that Britain "deserted" its colonies, like the islands of Zanzibar, before the time was right. In a postcolonial novel this might seem like a startling assertion, but it is not new to Gurnah. One of the main characters in By the Sea remarks that he married in 1963, "a year before the British departed in a huff and left us to the chaos and violence that attended the end of their empire." Gurnah appears to fault the British for not living up to their responsibilities, for disrupting a social order without being asked and then leaving the resulting problems for others to solve. One could even argue that the disjointed narrative in Desertion is deliberate, that it is Gurnah's way of reflecting a world in which relationships between people, between countries, are interrupted before they have run their course. Seen in this light, the novel has a staying power that belies its quietness.

The issue hits newsstands next week.

July 27, 2005

Nedjma's The Almond

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

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

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

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

But does any of this matter?

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

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

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

July 20, 2005

Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 27, 2005

Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter

My review of Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter appears in the Sunday Oregonian. Here's a snippet:

Part family saga, part chronicle of a tumultuous time in Mexican history, the novel is an enduring examination of the ways in which the divine and the logical come together, and how even the most reasoned people sometimes must surrender to the beauty of that which they cannot see.

Urrea has more than just a creative interest in this saint -- Teresita's real name is Teresa Urrea; she is his great-aunt. But this familial relationship is to the reader's benefit: The story of the saint is told with such love and care that it will make a believer out of anyone.

I am far from alone in my praise of the novel. The Hummingbird's Daughter has been collecting rave reviews so far. (See for example Marta Barber's review in the Miami Herald and David Hiltbrand's write up in San Jose Mercury News.) You can also check out this post, by Los Angeles writer (and frequent Moorishgirl.com contributor) Dan Olivas, and read his interview with the author:

DANIEL OLIVAS: One of the things the rave reviews keep on mentioning is the fact that your novel is based on a real person�your aunt. Why did you decide to fictionalize her life rather than attempt outright biography?

LUIS ALBERTO URREA: The simplest answer is you can't footnote a dream. The book has taken many forms over the years of research. But fiction kept asserting itself. I think the magic of fiction is that in many ways it's more true than non-fiction. By that I mean that fiction can take you into truths of feeling and it lends itself better to the kind of trance that allows a reader to smell and taste the world I'm trying to evoke. Also, as a lifelong reader, I can say that I come from a generation where the great achievement was the novel. So, you know, I wanted to try to honor her with an attempt at a masterpiece. You never know if you've gotten there or not, but no guts, no glory.

So, do yourself a favor, and go read The Hummingbird's Daughter.

May 16, 2005

Reza Aslan's No god but God

My review of Reza Aslan's excellent No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam appeared in the Sunday Oregonian. Here is an excerpt:

Debates [between traditionalists and reformers], Aslan concludes, show that Islam is as ordinary in its development as Christianity or Judaism: It is going through the same tensions between traditionalists and reformers that its monotheistic predecessors have. At this moment in its history, Aslan says, the Ulama, or clerics, still wield an enormous amount of power over the interpretation of faith in most Muslim countries, as well as a large amount of control over matters of the state in places such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Afghanistan. But that is changing, with reformers in Iran, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and the United States speaking up and demanding changes.

In much of "No god but God," Aslan castigates the Ulama for the powers they have retained. But Aslan himself is an alim of sorts. While he might claim to be a mere scholar of the Islamic Reformation, he is also one of its most articulate advocates.

Read it in full here.

April 20, 2005

Alicia Erian's Towelhead

As hard as it is to read novels about childhood sexual abuse, it must be even harder to write them. Alicia Erian has bravely undertaken this task in Towelhead, her debut novel. (She is also the author of the collection The Brutal Language of Love.) But Erian may have taken on too much; her attempt at adding a racial and