May 14, 2008
The New Prisons
From a brief piece in the London Review of Books on immigration detention centers:
Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea living in Brooklyn, is one of 71 detainees to have died in the last four years in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An illegal immigrant confined to a detention centre after his green card application was rejected, Bah died after a fall that no one seems to have witnessed. ICE, which was set up by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, is responsible for the detention of a staggering number of people: 311,213 last year, a million since 2004. They are held in prisons in which, according to Mark Dow, the author of American Gulag (2005), ‘extreme forms of physical abuse are not just aberrations.’ The centre where Bah was detained is managed by Corrections Corporation of America, a firm set up in 1983 in Nashville by a group of investors that included a former chairman of Tennessee’s Republican Party. A pioneer in running private prisons, it has also been quick to specialise in immigrant detention, the fastest growing branch of the incarceration business.Things are similarly bleak for immigrants and refugees in the UK, as Adam Shatz explains.CCA describes itself as the ‘nation’s largest provider of outsourced corrections management’, with 70,000 inmates and 16,000 staff. Its website speaks proudly of ‘similarities in mission and structure’ with the US army and makes a special appeal to veterans in search of work: ‘How will you make the transition from military to civilian life? CCA features a paramilitary structure: a highly refined chain of command, and policies and procedures that dictate facility operations.’
May 13, 2008
Emergency @ The Geffen
In class yesterday, we talked about stories that use history as a starting point, and the challenges that come with this undertaking. Daniel Beaty's one-man show Emergency (currently playing at The Geffen Playhouse) does just that. It's about a slave ship that rises out of the Hudson River, in front of the Statue of Liberty; the people of New York are all stunned, but they each react differently to the intrusion of history into their lives. Beaty performs approximately 40 characters, ranging from a little girl to an old widower, from a dispassionate newscaster to a reality TV show contestant. Some of the characters he brings to life are more fully realized than others, but their testimonies ring with truth--as painful, shocking, thought-provoking, and liberating as it may be. Emergency is playing until May 25, so don't miss it.
May 07, 2008
Recapture
While working on line edits for my new novel, I've been trying to justify my glacial pace to myself: it must be because I am busy with teaching; or because I spend too much time writing nonfiction; or because I am a perfectionist; or because English is my third language; or because I am lazy; and so on. In a fit of despair, I decided to read up on Vladimir Nabokov's editing process, and stumbled upon an article by Maxim D. Shrayer: "After Rapture and Recapture: Transformations in the Drafts of Nabokov's Stories," which was published in Russian Review. Shrayer cites Nabokov's preface to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
Rough drafts, false scents, half explored trails, dead ends of inspiration, are of little intrinsic importance. An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying canceled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.This makes the upcoming publication of The Original of Laura, the unfinished manuscript that Nabokov wanted destroyed, a tad problematic, but that's not my subject here. I was more interested in the distinction Nabokov drew between 'Rapture' and 'Recapture,' the former being the state of conception, a process not to be interrupted but to be followed wherever it leads, and the latter the state of composition, which is a more laborious, conscious process, and begins with the very first draft. Shrayer's article demonstrates the extent to which Nabokov recaptured: everything from stylistic revisions to structural changes. I think I needed to read this to be inspired. Back to work.
April 30, 2008
Right of Response
It seems there is some sort of brouhaha over reviews of Martin Amis's new book, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom, a collection of essays about terrorism, jihadism, and other -isms. One of the earliest write-ups here in the United States was by Michiko Kakutani, who hated it:
Indeed “The Second Plane” is such a weak, risible and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator.A few weeks later, Jim Sleeper rose in defense of Amis:
It would be too easy to read Martin Amis' slim book on Sept. 11 in a day and to dismiss it with a politically correct glare. The dozen essays, columns and reviews and two short stories in "The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom" are more illuminating than that, though deeply, sometimes self-indulgently flawed.This weekend, Leon Wieseltier rendered this judgment:
I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful. But the vacant intensity that has characterized so much of Amis’s work flourishes here too.Now Jim Sleeper has another retort/defense. You can find out more about the literary quarrel from Ron Hogan at Galleycat.
I find these disagreements quite healthy, but also very amusing, as it seems no one thinks it necessary or useful to ask a reviewer of the Muslim persuasion to take a look at the The Second Plane, a book that is, after all, largely concerned with Muslims: their religion, their beliefs, their politics, their life in Britain, and the violent encounters of the jihadist among them with the West. When Amis says:
There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."and then proceeds to write a whole book in which he expands on these ideas, shouldn't the reading public have a chance to find out what one of the people he seems so concerned about make of his work?
April 28, 2008
L.A.T. Fest
Thanks to those of you who came out to Korn Convocation Hall on the UCLA campus on Saturday. The place was packed, my panelists were great, and I had a wonderful time, even though I managed to get several sunburns. You can find full coverage of the fest at Jacket Copy, Counterbalance, and Book Fox. And of course don't miss Tod Goldberg's take on the weekend.
April 23, 2008
Iyer on Books and Music
A couple of days ago, the amazing Pico Iyer gave an appreciation on NPR of one of my favorite novels of all time: Graham Greene's The Quiet American. And then today he's sharing his music playlist with Dwight Garner over at Papercuts. Iyer's most recent book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He'll be talking about it at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend. You don't want to miss him.
April 17, 2008
R.I.P Aimé Césaire
I just heard news that the Martinican man of letters Aimé Césaire, who authored the classic Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, who inspired such different people as Frantz Fanon and Leopold Sedar Senghor, and who created the undeniably influential but now occasionally derided concept of négritude, has passed away in Fort-de-France. He was 94.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy is due to attend the funeral on Sunday. I wonder if his speech will bear any similarities to the the one he gave in Dakar last summer.
New Granta
The magazine Granta, which recently changed editors, has a new issue out, and a newly refurbished site to go with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Online Only section has an opinion piece by Ngugi wa Thiong'o on the crisis in Kenya:
The title of Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, best captures the complex mixture of emotions I felt as I watched televised images of fire and death stalking Kenyan streets. An otherwise smooth election marked by a spirited competition of views among citizens went awry at the moment of tallying. The result of the tallying became a dance of absurdity, with claims and counterclaims of rigging by the main contesting parties: Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU). The chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK), whose word would have helped those not at the scene make sense of it all, declared a winner, handed him the winner’s certificate and then said he knew the true presidential winner. The aggrieved party went to the streets but refused to go to the courts.The article is available in full here. There is also a photo essay by Nick Danziger of the infamous French banlieues: The Paris Intifada. To read Andrew Hussey's article, though, you will need to be a subscriber.The dance of absurdity became a dance of death.
LBF 2008
This year the London Book Fair hosted the Arab World as its special guest, so the focus has been on Arabic literature. The Guardian caught up with a number of Arab writers and asked them which works they think should be read today and The Independent's Boyd Tonkin has a very good overview of recent developments in the Arab literary scene. There's even a mention of the detective novel by Abdelilah Hamdouchi that I keep hearing about. It comes out here in the U.S. in May, under the title The Final Wager.
April 15, 2008
New Tingis
Tingis, the Moroccan American magazine of ideas and culture, has published its new issue, which you can already preview online. Tingis, you'll remember, is edited by Anouar Majid, who is also the author of A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America. I keep meaning to write about this book, and I keep getting sidetracked by other assignments. Here's an interview with Majid on Bill Moyers' show, just to give you an idea about his work.
Anyway, the new issue of Tingis includes a neat article about the use of the star of David on the Moroccan flag (prior to the French occupation, of course, and the ensuing tribalism), as well as a short story by a young Arizona-based writer, Abdennabi Benchehda: "The Daughter of Dr. Butrus." Check it out.
April 14, 2008
Wasserman on Castro
I am running around this morning trying to finish off a few things that I neglected because of edits on my new book, but I wanted to direct you to this interesting piece by Steve Wasserman, in which he reviews Fidel Castro's autobiography.
April 10, 2008
On Borrowings
English has yet to incorporate these words fully, and history suggests it might never do so. The language is filled with words that are culture specific: "sahib," "coolie," "effendi," "bey." The word "emir" simply means prince in Arabic, but in English it is a prince or ruler of an Islamic state. When my sister in Beirut tells her daughter a bedtime story, the emir kisses the sleeping princess awake. No mother in the U.S. or Britain would let an emir anywhere near a princess' lips. No princess will ever sing "Someday My Emir Will Come."And brilliantly he explains why. By the way, something tells me that many, many stories will be written about The Hakawati (The storyteller) so you'll want to get your copy soon.That in some ways is how it should be. Language, after all, is organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.
I bring all this up, however, to get to the word whose connotation I would love to see changed -- "Allah."
Allah means God.
In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.
(Photo credit: RAWI)
April 09, 2008
Read This
What a delightful surprise: This year's Reading the World initiative includes a collection of poems by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Gabriel Levin, Yahya Hijazi, and Peter Cole. (Cole, you'll remember, is a certified Genius.) The book is called So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005. Here is a sample poem by Taha Muhammad Ali. (Original Arabic here). I dare you not to cry when you read it.
April 08, 2008
Best. Line. Ever.
John Sutherland on Salman Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence:
If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.The full review is up here. The Man Booker will be awarded sometime in October 2008.
Wao Wows Judges
What a thrill it was to hear the good news: Junot Díaz has won this year's Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
April 07, 2008
Help the Dunbar Village Victims
Last week, the novelist Tayari Jones (The Untelling, Leaving Atlanta) wrote on her blog about the horrific crimes that took place in Dunbar Village last year. The victims, a Haitian immigrant and her twelve year old son, were treated with such depravity that I had a hard time believing that the four accused were between 14 and 18. Jones wrote of her outrage at the NAACP's demands to release the teens; she asked fellow writers to help raise money for the victims.
The eBay auction is now up: You can bid on a manuscript critiques by George Saunders, Nichelle Tramble, Sarah Schulman, Joy Castro, Martha Southgate, D. Nurkse, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, and me. Some authors are offering book proposal evaluations and even novel critiques. There are also lots of autographed books on offer. Please hop on over to eBay and make a bid.
April 02, 2008
IMPAC Shortlist
I don't keep up with literary prizes, but I always look forward to the announcement of the IMPAC Dublin award, because the nominations come from libraries around the world; any book in any language is eligible so long as there is an English-language translation; and translators are recognized alongside the authors. This year's shortlist has just been announced, and the finalists are:
The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas (translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean)
The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne
De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage
Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones
Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua (translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Schlesinger)
The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (translated from the French by John Cullen)
The Woman who Waited by Andrei Makine (translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan)
Winterwood by Patrick McCabe
Notice that three Arab writers have made the cut (Rawi Hage, who is Lebanese; Yasmina Khadra who is Algerian; and Sayed Kashua who is Palestinian) but none of them write in Arabic. Hage lives in Canada and writes in English; Khadra lives in France and writes in French; and Kashua is a citizen of Israel and writes in Hebrew. So few Arabic novels are translated into English that when Arab writers are recognized in international awards, they tend to be those who write in other languages.
The judging panel includes Helon Habila, Patricia Duncker, Aamer Hussein, Eibhlín Evans, and Jose Luis de Juan, and the winner(s) will be announced June 12.
March 25, 2008
Compelling Book Muses On Craft
There's a great post by Bob Harris over at the New York Times' Paper Cuts blog, in which he lists the seven deadly words of book reviewing. In the comments section, people have been contributing their own loathed terms. Hop on over there and add yours.
March 24, 2008
New Laroui
My friend H. forwarded me this link to the Le Monde review of Fouad Laroui's new novel, La femme la plus riche du Yorkshire. It's about a young Moroccan university professor named Adam Serghini, who arrives in the English countryside for work, and, bored out of his mind, decides to conduct an ethnological study of the population. He sits in their preferred habitat (the pub) and takes scrupulous notes of their mores. He soon meets a rich old lady, with whom he obviously has nothing in common. Clash of civilizations--and typical Laroui humor--ensues.
Anyway, don't bother looking up a date of release in the U.S. As incredible as it sounds, Laroui has never been translated into English. (Don't look at me. I tried to get several editors interested in him, even offering to translate him, but no one has shown any interest.)
March 13, 2008
"Arabic Booker"
I first heard about the project to establish The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker) at a reception in London a couple of years ago. I was, of course, delighted by the idea, particularly when one of the organizers told me that the winning book would be published throughout the Arab world, and translated outside of it, thus helping the author gain a wider readership. The cash awards ($10,000 for shortlisted authors, $50,000 for the winner) would also give a tremendous boost to authors in a part of the world where it is nearly impossible to live off of one's writing.
But even then I was under no illusions about the inclusiveness of the prize. The way these things often work is that, despite the richness of the Arabic language and its culture, the attention goes to the Middle East, with Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria dominating. The Maghreb, on the other hand, tends to be forgotten. And sure enough, despite the presence of my illustrious countrymen Mohammed Berrada and Mohammed Bennis on the judging panel, the shortlist included:
June Rain by Jabbour Douaihy (Lebanon)
The Land of Purgatory by Elias Farkouh (Jordan)
In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa (Syria)
Walking in the Dust by May Menassa (Lebanon)
Swan Song by Mekkaoui Said (Egypt)
Sunset Oasis by Baha Taher (Egypt)
Two Egyptians, two Lebanese, and yet not one Algerian, not one Moroccan, or Libyan or Mauritanian, or Tunisian. Why? There should be more effort to reach out to Arabic-language publishing houses in the Maghreb, and to encourage them to enter their authors in these prizes. And the publishers in the Maghreb need to keep themselves apprised of what is going on in the world of letters outside their borders.
At any rate, the International Prize for Arabic Fiction went to Baha Taher. Many congratulations to him. And I look forward to the day when someone like Bensalem Himmich or Leila Abouzeid gets a nod.
March 03, 2008
Beyond Baroque Stays Put
Nice news in the Los Angeles Times last Saturday: Beyond Baroque will stay in its Venice location for $1 per year for the next 25 years. Thank you, city council.
February 28, 2008
Dutton's To Close, Beyond Baroque To Follow?
As has been widely reported, one of the best independent bookstores in Los Angeles is closing. Dutton's had been at its Brentwood location for 23 years. I remember going there to hear Monica Ali, Michael Chabon, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many, many others. I was thrilled to read there when my own book came out in hardcover--a bit of a dream come true. But now, another Los Angeles bookstore is in danger: Beyond Baroque. An email currently making the rounds states that "[the] lease is now in question, and ends Saturday, March 1st. It has not been extended." The bookstore will be renting the space month to month from now on.
The reasons for both these developments are essentially the same: expensive retail space, competition from chains and online booksellers. I find it depressing that, with such a disproportionate number of wealthy people here, no one is coming forward to help independent literary culture survive. Quite the contrary, the millionaire who owns the building in which Dutton's is located has said that he would be willing to pay the bookstore's debts, and forgive the rent, so long as the bookstore closes at the end of April.
February 27, 2008
New LRB
The latest issue of the London Review of Books has a Diary piece (don't you love those? I do.) by Israeli journalist Yonathan Mendel, in which he describes his work covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A particularly interesting tidbit:
In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib? ‘The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them’: but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?All italics are Mendel's. He also looks at verbs like 'initiate,' or 'launch' versus 'respond.' Interesting stuff, particularly for those of us who are obsessed with language or politics (or both.)
February 21, 2008
Border Books
The L.A. Times Book Review includes a thoughtful piece by Josh Kun on two recent books about the U.S.-Mexico border: Hyper-Border by Fernando Romero and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border by Juan Felipe Herrera.
The U.S.-Mexico border is a 2,000-mile geopolitical line that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, slicing through 10 states, two deserts, at least four different regional accents and at least three different philosophies on how to cook meat, all while changing shape from rivers to rocks to ranch fences to wooden posts to menacing metal walls rigged with electronic sensors.Romero's book redefines the idea of a clear border by providing a complex image of the region, with its interdependencies, while Herrera's book is a collection of his poetry, essays and reflections over 30 years of activism on behalf of border peoples, border generations, border languages.Yet the border has never been just a line on a map. CNN's Lou Dobbs knows this as well as a Tijuana local who wakes up to the smell of U.S. Border Patrol tear gas. It is a machine and a metaphor, a tool and a scapegoat, an entire cosmology and, especially these days, a political quagmire as laden with quicksand as the mention of a Palestinian state at a Passover table. There's no way to talk about it without getting lost in circuitous, maddening debate.
February 18, 2008
New Bidoun
The Winter 2008 issue of the magazine Bidoun includes a lovely article by Issandr El Amrani on Anfas (Souffles), the legendary Moroccan literary and cultural magazine. Here is a brief snippet
In 1966, a small group of Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals launched Souffles, a quarterly review that would over time become at once a vehicle for cultural renewal and an instigator of efforts to promote social justice in the Maghreb. From its very first issue, Souffles was a unique experiment, a Moroccan and Maghrebi effort to liberate the country's intellectual framework from fetid provincialism and lingering colonial complexes. It was a cri de coeur, a rebellion against the artistic status quo, a manifesto for a new aesthetics, even a new worldview. Its trademark cover, emblazoned with an intense black sun, radiated rebellion.The full article is available online here, so please take a look.
Banks's Latest
Luc Sante reviews Russell Banks's new novel, The Reserve, for the NYT Book Review, and he doesn't seem to like it very much:
It is 1936, and we are in the Adirondacks, at a party at a luxurious camp on a vast private reserve. (“Camp” is a local upper-caste understatement, comparable to the use of “cottage” in Newport, R.I.) As the sun begins to dip behind the mountain range that dominates the horizon, a beautiful young woman detaches herself from her elders and walks barefoot to the shore of the lake. Suddenly a seaplane appears in the air and all look on, stunned, as it lands on the surface of the water. Such a thing has never before occurred, and furthermore is taboo under the largely unspoken laws of the reserve. A dashing aviator — we will discover that he is a famous artist, a radical, a free spirit — steps out of the plane and locks eyes with the glamorous yet troubled young woman.I'm a bit disappointed, because Banks's Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter are among my favorite novels, and I always hope to find the magic again.You can picture this on the movie screen, can’t you: all golden light and exquisite set design and dazzling wardrobe and starring, perhaps, Keira Knightley. Russell Banks’s new novel begins this way, and the scene exemplifies both its strengths and its weaknesses — it is not necessarily evident which is which.
February 07, 2008
Goldman Profile
There's a great profile of Francisco Goldman in last weekend's Guardian Review. His latest book, The Art of Political Murder, is just now coming out in the U.K.
January 30, 2008
Titlepage Coming Soon
When I was a young, nerdy teenager, I never missed Bernard Pivot's Apostrophes, the famed French chat show about literature. It was informed but not stuffy, and Pivot really did read the 3 or 4 books that were discussed each fortnight (imagine that!). I never understood why there wasn't something similar in the States. I like Charlie Rose, but his PBS show is usually a one-on-one interview with no opportunity for discussion among different writers of the same genre. But now comes word that Daniel Menaker, former editor at the New Yorker and at Random House, is going to start an online TV show called Titlepage.
“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.I am so excited about this. I hope the show is good.
January 28, 2008
"The Enormous Radio" in Radio Form
A few weeks ago, in my Beginning Fiction class, we read John Cheever's short story "The Enormous Radio," which was published in the New Yorker in 1947. I've always liked that story, and it still seems relevant today, what with MySpace and YouTube. Now I just came across this 1956 radio adaptation from CBS Radio Workshop. It's interesting to see what choices were made in the course of turning the story into a radio play; for instance, Cheever barely paid any attention to the maid in the story (the reader doesn't find out her name is Emma until the very end), and certainly he doesn't give any idea about her race, but in the radio adaptation she is played by someone who is clearly going for a black character. Both the avoidance of race in the story (no one's is mentioned) and the recourse to stereotypes in the adaptation seem to me to be reflections of the times, and I wonder what people will say in fifty years about today's stories, and about our blind spots.
The picture above is of my own, enormous radio: An old Philco we picked up at an antiques store in Portland a few years ago.
January 17, 2008
Nabokov's Last
Vladimir Nabokov's last manuscript, The Original of Laura, is apparently in a vault in Switzerland. Nabokov wanted it destroyed, but his son Dmitri (now 73) is undecided about the directive, according to Slate's Ron Rosenbaum.
Dmitri's predicament goes beyond Laura. It's one that raises the difficult issue of who "owns" a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it's in?To me, an unpublished manuscript belongs to the author only; if Nabokov wanted it destroyed, then it should be.
January 03, 2008
WWB Book Club: The Radiance of the King
I have two new posts up at Words Without Borders, one in which I discuss some of the literary influences at play in Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King, and a second one about Toni Morrison's introduction to the novel. I hope you've enjoyed reading this novel as much as I did.
December 12, 2007
New Yorker Stories of 2007
Over the past year, novelist Cliff Garstang has been commenting on short stories published in the New Yorker, and now he promises he will reveal his five favorites soon. I canceled my subscription to the magazine when I moved back to Morocco to finish my book, and I was often grateful to be able to read the stories online, although I didn't always keep up with them, so I just spent the past hour browsing though the posts and reading (or rereading) some of the pieces.
December 11, 2007
Writers, Beware
I hadn't heard of this author scam before.
December 10, 2007
Darwish Review
Mahmoud Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden, which appeared in the United States in a translation by Fady Joudah almost a year ago but has not gotten a single review in a newspaper or magazine, was written up this weekend in the Guardian. Here's what Fiona Sampson said about the book:
This most public of Palestinians is the master not of reductive polemic but of a profoundly lyric imagination, one that draws together the textures of daily life, physical beauty - whether of landscape or of women - longing, myth and history. Using poetry complex with personal experience, he has recreated an entire society's sensibility.Read it all here.
WWB Book Club: The Radiance of the King
My discussion of Camara Laye's novel The Radiance of the King continues over at Words Without Borders. Here's a snippet:
I want to start our discussion of The Radiance of the King by talking about the story itself. In the novel, Clarence, a white man of undefined origin and occupation, lands on the coast of Africa (which coast, you ask? We are not told) and in short order he loses all his money, in a gambling game, to a group of white men. He is evicted from his hotel, and the owner decides to keep Clarence's trunk as collateral for the unpaid bill. Now Clarence is desperate; he wants to figure out a way to get his belongings, since his only possessions now are the clothes on his back, which are already showing signs of wear. He stumbles onto a street celebration for a local monarch, and immediately and rather arrogantly thinks that the king might hire him as an advisor, or at least vouch for him to the hotel owner, or, at any rate, know what to do to save Clarence from the misery in which he finds himself.Do visit.
Pamuk Profile
I love reading the profiles Maya Jaggi writes for the Guardian, don't you? Her latest one is of Orhan Pamuk.
December 05, 2007
R.I.P. Elizabeth Hardwick
Sad news this morning: Novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, who co-founded the New York Review of Books, has died.
No More Print P-Boz
Pindeldyboz has announced that it will cease publication of its print magazine on December 10, 2007. They're having a party in New York to celebrate the final issue. Check it out.
December 04, 2007
On Martin Amis
I have been battling with every ounce of my strength the urge to respond to Martin Amis's latest comments on Muslims. I have succumbed to that urge before, mind you, but not this time. Instead, I offer you, gentle reader, a quote from James Baldwin.
[I]ndeed, within this web of lust and fury, black and white can only thrust and counter-thrust, long for each other's slow, exquisite death; death by torture, acid knives and burning; the thrust, the counter-thrust, the longing making the heavier that cloud which blinds and suffocates them both, so that they go down into the pit together. Thus has the cage betrayed us all, this moment, our life, turned to nothing through our terrible attempts to insure it. For Bigger's tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria, bequeathed to him at birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult--that is, accept it.Excerpted from "Everybody's Protest Novel," reprinted in Notes of a Native Son.
December 03, 2007
WWB Book Club: The Radiance of the King
As I mentioned a few days ago, Words Without Borders has asked me to lead a book club discussion of Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King. My first post is already up on their site. Here's how it starts:
When my friend Mark Sarvas introduced his book club discussion of Sándor Márai’s The Rebels, he wrote that “as an American of Hungarian descent, taking on Márai was an obvious and overdue choice for me.” I confess to a very similar bias in my own choice. When I was presented with a list of books to pick from, I naturally gravitated to a novel by a fellow African, in this case Camara Laye, whose Radiance of the King I had not read before. Generally speaking, African authors who write in French, or indeed in any of the native languages of Africa such as Gikuyu or Berber or Swahili, are not nearly as known or read in the United States as those who write in English. So the opportunity to discuss Camara Laye was also an opportunity for me to invite readers to consider a different African book and a different African author than those with whom they may already be familiar.You can visit the book club area for the rest of this entry, and to post some comments.Camara Laye was born in 1928 in Kouroussa, a small village of Guinea, which at that time was under French occupation. He attended Qur’anic school as well as elementary school in his village, but moved to Conakry, the capital, in order to continue his education. In 1947, he moved to Paris to attend engineering school. His experience of double dislocation—from his village to the city, from Guinea to France—appears to have inspired in him a deep nostalgia for home. His first novel, the semi-autobiographical L’Enfant noir (usually translated as The Dark Child), was published in 1953, and was met with a mixture of admiration and hostility: Admiration for Camara’s storytelling skills, and hostility for his depiction of an idyllic village childhood at a time when the country was under colonial rule. These reactions remind me of those reserved for Moroccan novelist Ahmed Sefroui’s La Boîte à merveilles, published in 1954, and which also depicted a happy childhood under/despite French rule. Some scholars today may consider both novels ethnographic works, while others may emphasize the tribute they pay to ways of life later disrupted by French rule.
November 19, 2007
WWB Book Club
Words Without Borders, the wonderful organization that brings you literature in translation, recently started an online book club. I've linked before to the conversations: Mark Sarvas discussing Sándor Márai's The Rebels and Michael Orthofer talking about Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins.
I mention all of this again because, next month, I will be doing the book club discussion on Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King, translated from the French by James Kirkup. If you're interested, why not get the book at your local bookstore, or borrow it from your library? You have a couple of weeks before the conversation starts. I haven't read the novel yet myself--I am taking it with me when I go on vacation later this week, and will savor it then. Once I have something up on the WWB website, I'll mention it in this space as well, so you can take part in the conversation.
November 16, 2007
New Bookforum
The new issue of Bookforum is now available, and it includes a review by Siddhartha Deb of J.M. Coetzee's new novel Diary of a Bad Year. In the U.K., where the book first appeared, the reviews have been mixed, but this early piece here in the U.S. is just lovely. Here is its concluding paragraph:
The books have all been short, the language deceptively simple, but Coetzee’s recurrent themes have been no less than the vital signs of a culture, one possibly in its death throes. Diary of a Bad Year may be his most successful diagnosis yet of what we are suffering from, one that even offers hope in the form of resistance, critical thought, and the odd, imperfect humanity that emerges in the story of Anya and Señor C. In other writers, such hope would appear trite, but we know that Coetzee is no sentimentalist. His humanism has always been hard-won, wrested from those early lessons in authoritarianism and opposition, and this brilliant novel shows how much better prepared Coetzee is than many Western writers to come to terms with our new age.When I was in Europe earlier this fall I was frustrated to see that the Italian translation of the novel was already published while we here in the U.S. had to wait until January. Another six weeks to go!
November 13, 2007
The Barbarians Are At The Gate, Part 5786
In the Financial Times, Simon Kuper reviews four recent books that purport to show that Europe is under attack from Islam and/or Muslims: Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept, Walter Laqueur's The Last Days of Europe, Melanie Phillips's Londonistan, and Bat Ye'or's Eurabia. Here is Kuper's intro:
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written in the 1890s, possibly by the Russian-French journalist Matthieu Golovinski, and spread by the Tsarist secret police. A forgery, it claimed to be the manual of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.And then he proceeds to deconstruct all these books' claims. You can read the full article here.Bat Ye'or, author of the little-read but influential book Eurabia, repeatedly mentions the Protocols. Well she might, because Eurabia has been described as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in reverse. Bat Ye'or is Hebrew for ''daughter of the Nile'', the pseudonym of a woman who fled Egypt as a Jew in 1957 and now lives in Switzerland. In Eurabia, she purports to reveal an Arab-European conspiracy to rule the world.
Though ludicrous, Eurabia became the spiritual mother of a genre. Ye'or's genius was to bridge two waves of anti-European books: those of 2002-03, which said Europe had gone anti-Semitic again, and those of 2006-07, which say Europe is being conquered by Muslims.
The four books here provide a fair summary of the ''Eurabia'' genre. False as they are, their existence reveals something about the geopolitical moment.
November 12, 2007
Lindelof on the WGA Strike
I've been following media coverage of the Writers' Guild strike, and it's really unsettling to see how the writers are being portrayed as greedy bastards who don't care that TV crew-members will be losing their jobs soon. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Damon Lindelof, who writes for Lost--a show I watched on TV here and streamed online when I was in Morocco on my Fulbright--explains why the strike is necessary:
The motivation for this drastic action — and a strike is drastic, a fact I grow more aware of every passing day — is the guild’s desire for a portion of revenues derived from the Internet. This is nothing new: for more than 50 years, writers have been entitled to a small cut of the studios’ profits from the reuse of our shows or movies; whenever something we created ends up in syndication or is sold on DVD, we receive royalties. But the studios refuse to apply the same rules to the Internet.Read it all here. You can send a message of support through this website.My show, “Lost,” has been streamed hundreds of millions of times since it was made available on ABC’s Web site. The downloads require the viewer to first watch an advertisement, from which the network obviously generates some income. The writers of the episodes get nothing. We’re also a hit on iTunes (where shows are sold for $1.99 each). Again, we get nothing.
R.I.P. Norman Mailer
As you no doubt have heard, Norman Mailer died on Saturday, at the age of 84. I have read too little of his work to contribute anything personal in this space, but there are articles and remembrances in the NY Times, the Washington Post, the SF Chronicle, the Nation, the New Yorker, TEV, Critical Mass, and many, many other newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Here in Los Angeles, the Times had a front-page obit yesterday, a long article that covered Mailer's entire literary career and included photos from key moments.
November 06, 2007
Coetzee's Critical Library
Critical Mass, the blog of the National Books Critics Circle, has a fairly regular feature called "The Critical Library," which, as the title suggests, asks critics to name their favorite volumes on criticism. Today, J. M. Coetzee contributes his list, so take a look.
You want to know what my own critical library--for the English language anyway--would look like? Here's a picture:
Book Club: Akutagawa’s Mandarins
The Complete Review's Michael Orthofer leads a book club discussion of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins for Words Without Borders. I haven't read anything by Akutagawa, not even Rashomon, upon which Kurosawa's famed film is based, so the background information that Michael offers is really helpful. I'm looking forward to reading the book along with the group.
November 05, 2007
Persepolis, Le Film
The Los Angeles Times has a sneak peek at Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronneaud's film adaptation of Persepolis. I was fortunate enough to see the movie at the Internazionale Festival in Ferrara last month, and it was beautiful. It opens here on December 25.
November 01, 2007
New Collection by Bendib
Cartoonist Khalil Bendib has published a new collection of cartoons, which he presented in Los Angeles a few days ago. Here are a couple of photos from the event at the Beverly Hills Public Library:
The cartoon above shows a colony of Dick Cheney lookalikes, carrying bags labeled "Fraud," "No Bid Contracts," "Food Services Overcharges," and "Gasoline Overcharges." The caption says: "Hallibaba and the Forty Thieves."
This one shows two Al-Saud family members fast asleep while their answering machine responds to an incoming call: "Hello. You have reached the House of Saud. We're busy at the moment. If this is an emergency and thousands of pilgrims are dying due to our incompetence, at the sound of the beep please leave us alone. Thank you."
Bendib's new collection is called Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America's Most Wanted Political Cartoonist. You can view many of Bendib's cartoons on his website. Enjoy.
Oz on Literature
Amos Oz delivers an impassioned plea for literature in this L.A. Times op-ed:
If you are a mere tourist, you might stand on a street and look up at an old house, in the old part of town, and see a woman staring out of her window. Then you will walk on.By the by, Gil Hochberg's book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination deals with the problem that Oz lays out in this piece. Hochberg contends that, in literature at least, Jews and Arabs have always met, always mixed, always found the self within the other. At a reading sponsored by the Levantine Center last week, Hochberg cited numerous examples, though the one that stuck in my mind and aroused my curiosity most was the work of (Moroccan) Israeli novelist Albert Suissa.But if you are a reader, you can see that woman staring out of her window, but you are there with her, inside her room, inside her head.
As you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other people's living rooms, into their nurseries and studies, into their bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family joys, into their dreams.
Which is why I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagining the other will make you not only a better businessperson or a better lover but even a better person.
Part of the tragedy between Jew and Arab is the inability of so many of us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine each other. Really imagine each other: the loves, the terrible fears, the anger, the passion. There is too much hostility between us, too little curiosity.
October 29, 2007
R.I.P. Sargon Boulus
A kind reader emailed to inform me of the passing of Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus. Here is a lovely piece about Boulus and his work by fellow Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, who recounts the last time he saw Boulus, already very sick, at a literary festival in a small town in France. Youssef eulogizes Boulus, saying:
وأقول إنه الشاعرُ الوحيدُ...And here's my (humble) translation:
هو لم يكن سياسياً بأيّ حالٍ.
لكنه أشجعُ كثيراً من الشعراء الكثارِ الذين استعانوا برافعة السياسة حين تَرْفعُ...
لكنهم هجروها حين اقتضت الخطر!
وقف ضدّ الاحتلال، ليس باعتباره سياسياً، إذ لم يكن سركون بولص، البتةَ، سياسياً.
وقفَ ضد الاحتلال، لأن الشاعر، بالضرورة، يقف ضد الاحتلال.
سُــمُوُّ موقفِه
هو من سُــمُوّ قصيدته.
And I say he is the only poet...You can read the rest of Youssef's piece here.
He was not political in any case.
But he was more courageous than many other poets who used the banner of politics when it suited
and then abandoned it when it presented danger.
He stood against occupation, not because he was political, since Sargon Boulus was not political at all.
He stood against occupation because the poet, by necessity, stands against occupation
The eminence of his position
is the eminence of his poem.
This Week's New Yorker
Even though we moved back to Los Angeles about two months ago, I have yet to catch up with all my forwarded mail. And I still have not renewed any of my usual subscriptions (except for the New York Review of Books). So it's with more than a little wistfulness that I look at interesting issues of some magazines. This week's New Yorker, for instance, has a wonderful poem by Robert Bly, an essay by Elizabeth Kolbert about the disturbing tendency by U.S. automakers to take billions in government help without producing fuel-efficient cars, and a piece on the Frida Kahlo "cult" (of which I will freely admit to being a member.)
Pamuk on the Paris Review
Orhan Pamuk has a brief essay at the Guardian about reading the Paris Review interviews as a young author in Istanbul. "In the beginning," he writes, "I read these interviews because I loved these writers' books, because I wished to to learn their secrets, to understand how they created their fictive worlds. But I also enjoyed reading interviews with novelists and poets whose names I hardly knew, and whose books I had not read."
October 26, 2007
Strangers, Identical
I heard the incredible story of twin sisters Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein on NPR yesterday. Here's the blurb from the station's site:
Separated in infancy and given up for adoption, Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein grew up unaware that they had an identical twin. Their new memoir, Identical Strangers, chronicles their story of separation, reunion and identity.The segment is a bit long, but it's absolutely fascinating.Records from the adoption agency indicate that the identical twins' separation and adoption placement in the late 1960s was connected to a psychological study investigating the effects of nature versus nurture.
October 25, 2007
(Screen)Writers' Work
This week, both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report--the only TV programs I never miss--went on hiatus, so Comedy Central has been doing re-runs. It's been a small taste of what life will be like if members of the Writers' Guild of America decide to go on strike. At Salon, Laura Miller reviews Marc Norman's What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting and starts off with a few anecdotes about the contempt with which screenwriters are held in Hollywood, then reveals some of the uglier side of the business. All very interesting.
October 23, 2007
Ribat El Koutoub Debuts
Activists, professors and authors Abdelhay El Moudden and Abdelahad Sebti have launched an online Moroccan literary magazine called Ribat El Koutoub. It features book reviews, interviews, articles, and literary news. Check it out.
October 22, 2007
On Short Stories
Maud Newton has a wonderful review in Sunday's NYTBR of Ellen Litman's Last Chicken in America. Here's how it opens:
That people won’t read story collections is an axiom at publishing houses and a common notion in newspaper idea pieces. Whether it was ever true I tend to doubt, but it certainly isn’t now. Evidence springs effortlessly to mind — Junot Díaz, ZZ Packer, Lorrie Moore and George Saunders are just a few of the youngish writers beloved first for the short fiction that started their careers — yet the distrust persists.More here.When a good novel fails to find an audience, it’s the fault of bad marketing, unappealing cover art or a public too dim to appreciate literary fiction. But if short stories don’t sell, publishers blame the form. The resulting skittishness may account for the rise of the “novel in stories,” a hybridized creature typically denoted, as in the case of Ellen Litman’s “Last Chicken in America,” by an italicized subtitle.
The worst of these books are chilly and labyrinthine. You follow dour characters down corridors of plot, theme or emotion that threaten to lead to some destination, but never actually do. Litman’s elegantly constructed web of stories about Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh is the converse of such aimless solemnity. It’s warm, true and original, and packed with incisive, subtle one-liners.
Department of WTF
Giles Foden, the author of The Last King of Scotland and this year's chair of judges for the Booker Prize, files a post-mortem piece for the Guardian about the judging process. I was shocked to read this tidbit:
The Reluctant Fundamentalist divided the panel: one judge felt the book tacitly supported Islamic fundamentalist violence, another that it evaded the issue. I thought these views were wrong. To my mind the skill of the book lay in the way its ingenious narrative device implicated the reader in the political issues explored.Some of the judges thought The Reluctant Fundamentalist condones Islamic fundamentalist violence? The character of Changez smiles at the collapse of the towers not out of political or religious fervor, but because of feelings of inferiority and resentment that he, a man from a forgotten city of the third world, harbors toward the strongest city of the first world and its obscenely powerful corporations. But let's face it: If the book had been written by a middle-aged white man (think Updike) he'd have been praised for his insights into the "Muslim mind."The text itself remained ambivalent. The fact that the device was borrowed or learned from Camus' The Fall did not generate as much excitement among the judges as it did among certain literary journalists. Most of us felt imitation of form was one of the ways in which literature is carried on. Besides, the debt to the author of The Fall was implicitly acknowledged by its overtness, and by a mention of Camus in the blurb.
October 16, 2007
Ali on Whipped-Up Controversy
Monica Ali wrote a piece for the Guardian in which she derides the media (including the newspaper that published her article) for giving so much attention to the handful of people who protested the making of her book into a film. Here's a very quotable excerpt:
As seems to be the way with these things, press coverage began (in this newspaper) with the reporting of the views of a couple of self-appointed "community leaders". I love it when a journalist does this. I think of him stumbling around Tower Hamlets, waving a notebook and echoing the old colonial cry from down the ages: take me to your leader.Of course, writers who have ancestral roots in Muslim nations are used to this: Any kind of a protest over a supposedly offensive book is blown way out of proportion in the West, and the author turned into a martyr, whether she likes it or not.
See also:
Department of WTF.
Tempest in a Teacup.
October 11, 2007
And The Nobel Goes To...
Doris Lessing! I sort of suspected it would be an English-language writer this year, but honestly I had not even thought of Doris Lessing. It's nice to be surprised, don't you think? Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review has already posted links to reviews, interviews, and commentary, which you should check out.
October 03, 2007
Nobel Predictions
Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review has posted some links over the last couple of days about odds and guesses leading up to the announcement, in a week or so, of the Nobel Prize in literature. Last year, I correctly predicted that the prize would go to Orhan Pamuk, and this year I am not getting a strong feeling, but I'm still going to give it a try. I think it will go to Cormac McCarthy. You heard it here first.
October 02, 2007
First Lines
First Lines is a Cornell University site that collects opening lines from many classic novels, and lets you guess which books they came from. Warning: It's pretty addictive.
October 01, 2007
Iyer on Pamuk
What a delightful surprise: The amazing Pico Iyer reviews Orhan Pamuk's new collection of essays for the New York Times. Here's a brief excerpt:
“Other Colors” is too eagerly inclusive to make up the single-pointed, honed narrative that its author promises. Like the maximalist “Black Book” or “My Name Is Red,” it is more a fireworks display than a rounded sculpture (it’s no surprise that a favorite Pamuk character is the “encyclopedist ”). Yet what emerges powerfully, and often movingly, from it is Pamuk’s faith in writing as a “consolation” and refuge, “our only defense against life’s cruelties.” When he titles one major section in the book “My Books Are My Life,” he seems to be speaking both for the way that he has put almost all his adult life into his work (sitting in his room 10 hours every day and barely leaving Istanbul until he was 31 ), and for the fact that his shrine is his library of 12,000 books (in a culture that “views the nonreader as the norm”).You can read the entire article here.
September 26, 2007
On Edward Said
On the fourth anniversary of Edward Said's passing, Randa Jarrar has posted a poem/appreciation she wrote for him. Here are the first two stanzas:
It's been four years and a day.Read the poem in full here.
I like the way you wrote about bellydancers,
Tahia Carioca, who couldn't tell you how many men she'd married.
When you asked her,
She could only utter a shrillKteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!
And I love the way you wrote
about those who wrote badly about bellydancers,
Oriental feet and jingles
and finger cymbals.
Edward, I wanted to meet you, wanted to fete you,
to talk about lost houses and lost selves and bellydance
with you.
What else would we have talked about?Kteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!
Feminist Recommendations
Jessica Valenti, Natasha Walter, Rebecca Walker, Julie Binder, Ariel Levy, and Joan Smith tell readers which books on feminism most marked them.
September 24, 2007
New Pamuk
I just got Orhan Pamuk's new collection of essays, Other Colors, and I am so excited about it, I can't wait to dive into it. The review by Michael McGaha in this weekend's SF Chronicle makes me look forward to it. It's interesting, too, to read his comments about the translation, by Maureen Freely:
The best thing one can say about Freely's translation is that it doesn't read like a translation. If you didn't know, you would never guess this book had originally been written in a foreign language. Freely's approach to translation seems to be to think about the meaning of Pamuk's Turkish and then rephrase the idea in English as she would have expressed it. For example, when Pamuk writes "from now on until the end of my life, I will never smoke a cigarette again," Freely translates: "I'm never going to smoke again, ever." The basic idea is there, and Freely's sentence sounds more natural in English than Pamuk's, yet something important is lost.You can read the article in full here.Sometimes her formulations seem to complicate things unnecessarily. When Pamuk writes, "Looking out the window was such a basic habit that when television did come to Turkey, people started looking at it as if they were looking out the window," the aptly named Freely translates: "Looking out the window was such an important pastime that when television did finally come to Turkey, people acted the same way in front of their sets as they had in front of their windows." In this case even the meaning seems somewhat distorted, and once again, the poetry of the original is lost. Why not let Pamuk be Pamuk?
Lending New Meaning to the Term 'Diva'
From Peter Conrad's Guardian review of a new biography of Rudolph Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh:
If he didn't like a ballerina he was partnering, he ungallantly let her thud to the ground. Once, he dragged an uncooperative dancer across the floor by her necklace, grazing her throat; he fractured the jaw of a male colleague who annoyed him. He ripped up costumes, hurled Thermos flasks into mirrors, spat at photographers and kicked police cars. In a tizz at Zeffirelli's chintzy villa, he hurled a wrought-iron chair at his host and pulled down a curtain rod with which he pounded some majolica pottery to smithereens. Expelled from the premises, he paused to shit on the steps like an indignant, incontinent dog.There's more here, too.
September 20, 2007
No Hotcakes
The UK Telegraph has published sales figures for this year's shortlisted books. Kind of shocking.
September 13, 2007
New LRB
The latest issue of the London Review of Books is available, and it includes an excellent essay by Hilary Mantel on two new books about the AIDS crisis in South Africa. The essay explores sociological, economic, historical, and cultural aspects of the epidemic in a country that struck down apartheid only a decade or so ago. A must read.
September 12, 2007
New Mag: Meena
Take a look at Meena; it's a new literary magazine, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Alexandria, Egypt.
September 11, 2007
El Che's Notebook
The Guardian reports that the contents of Che Guevara's private notebook will be published next month in Mexico. Instead of the political writing or guerrilla strategy one might expect, the notebook contained Che's favorite poetry, written in his hand.
September 10, 2007
Al Aswany Interview
The Observer has an interview with novelist/dentist Alaa Al Aswany about his best-selling novel The Yacoubian Building. The piece is called "An author with bite" (har, har). Al Aswany's new novel, Chicago, will apparently be released by the American University in Cairo Press in 2008, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't have a U.S. publisher yet.
September 07, 2007
Booker Shortlist
The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced yesterday afternoon, and it includes: Darkmans by Nicola Barker, The Gathering by Anne Enright, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, and Animal’s People by Indra Sinha. Several newspapers and a few bookies are giving McEwan as the favorite. Of the six finalists, I have read only Hamid; I have McEwan's new novel, but haven't gotten to it yet. The winner will be announced in October.
September 06, 2007
Díaz Interview
The amazing Dave Weich interviews Junot Díaz about his new novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Toward the end of their chat, Dave asks Díaz what he would consider his greatest weakness as a writer. Díaz replies that "he doesn't write enough," but then later seems to remember something:
Díaz: - Oh, I suck at dialogue.This sounded so strange to me--I think Díaz is actually brilliant at dialogue and have used an exchange from "Fiesta, 1980" in a class on language. Funny how writers' perceptions of their work can vary so greatly from those of their readers.Dave: You suck at dialogue?
Díaz: Definitely. If I were better at dialogue, I'd probably be walking around with a fur coat.
September 05, 2007
A Lesson in Detail
From the first few pages of J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K.
K had never been into the flat before. He found it in chaos. In a wash of water driven through the windows by high winds lay broken furniture, gutted mattresses, fragments of glass and crockery, withered pot-plants, sodden bedding and carpeting. A paste of cake flour, breakfast cereal, sugar, cat litter and earth stuck to his shoes. In the kitchen the refrigerator lay on its face, its motor still purring, a yellow scum leaking past its hinges into the half-inch of water on the tiled floor. Rows of jars had been swept off the shelves; there was a reek of wine. On the gleaming white walls someone had written in oven cleaner: TO HEL.What gets me is the "the half-inch" of water.
August 23, 2007
R.I.P. Qurratulain Hyder
More sad news: Qurratulain Hayder, whose 1959 novel A River of Fire was favorably compared to Rushdie's Midnight's Children, has also passed away.
R.I.P. Grace Paley
I found out the terrible news by reading Maud Newton's blog this morning: Grace Paley has passed away. The New York Times has an obit as well.
August 16, 2007
Writers To Sarkozy: Don't Rewrite History
On July 26, French president Nicolas Sarkozy gave a speech in Dakar, addressed not to his Senegalese hosts, but rather to "African youth" in its entirety. The speech was a bizarre mix of neo-colonial clichés and passionate promises of help. The trouble in Africa, as in the Middle East, has always been the sheer number of people so eager to help, and all out of altruism, of course.
Among other things, Sarkozy said that slavery happened, but it's all in the past; that he did not want to speak of repentance, but of the future; that colonialism was not all bad because the French built schools, roads, and bridges. (Whenever someone claims that the French built schools in Morocco, I always like to point out that in 44 years of their presence in my homeland, they managed to graduate fewer than 50 people from university; so enough about the 'benefits' of colonization already.) Sarkozy then claimed that the African farmer knows only the "eternal beginning of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words." (Three guesses as to who will help Africans enter, at long last, into history.) He added that France would help all African nations who wish to have democracy. And then he went on to meet with Omar Bongo of Gabon, one of the oldest dictators in Africa. (40 years and going!) It was, in short, the kind of speech that really made me wonder how French imperialism, both military and economic, is not talked about in the West to the same extent as, for instance, British or American interventions.
Needless to say, Sarkozy's speech was severely criticized in Senegalese newspapers, and in the African press at large. His speech drew a response from the African literary community, as well. In Libération last week, Raharimanana (of Madagascar), Boubacar Boris Diop (of Sénégal), Abderrahman Beggar (of Morocco), Patrice Nganang (of Cameroon), Koulsy Lamko (of Chad), Kangni Alem (of Togo), and Jutta Hepke (of Germany) addressed an open letter to the president, in which they ask him to "stop fraternizing with the gravediggers of our hopes" and invite him to have a true debate.
August 14, 2007
Saunders Does Climate Change
A day in the life of George Saunders, a few years from now:
Syracuse, New York, where I live, is famous for its brutal winters. We're having one now. Although it's been a strange year, weatherwise, given "global warming" and all. (Thanks Mr. Gore, for inventing that!) Yesterday it was a nice mild summer day, about 150 degrees - I'd just come inside from mopping up the puddle that was formerly Keith, our postman - when suddenly, I could feel it in my bones, that good old "Ah, winter's a-coming!" feeling.More Saundersian genius here. The piece originally appeared in Neue Zürcher Zeitung in March, and was reprinted on signandsight.com last weekend.And I was right.
Suddenly the temperature dropped - three hundred degrees in one hour, a local record! It was so lovely, I couldn't resist putting my work aside and donning special clothing purchased from NASA and taking a stroll through this "winter wonderland." It was gorgeous: the neighborhood cats, converted to ice-cats in mid-stride, four pert little robins literally frozen to death on a clothesline, little beaks open in mid-peep.
I guess I'm just a sucker for the "pastoral." Across the street, here was old Mrs Clark, bending to pick up her newspaper, grouchy look frozen on her face, reaching back absent-mindedly to scratch her - it was really too bad. I liked Mrs Clark. I mean, yes, she was always complaining - about Mr Clark, about the president not signing the Kyoto treaty, the kids running across her lawn, the way our lawmakers embrace pseudo-science to protect the big oil companies: a real malcontent - but still, you hate anyone to be instantaneously frozen, especially right out there where you can see them, cluttering up your beautiful winter view.
August 13, 2007
Season in Review
Dan Olivas reviews Dahlia Season, the debut collection of stories by Long Beach author Myriam Gurba for the El Paso Times.
August 09, 2007
Booker Longlist
As has been widely reported, the longlist for the Booker Prize was announced. I was pleased to see Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist included, but surprised that J. M. Coetzee's new book, Diary of A Bad Year, was not. Still, it's nice to see younger authors get a shot. (The shortlist will be announced on September 6 and the winner on October 16.)
August 07, 2007
'Letter to Jimmy'
Alain Mabanckou's new book, Lettre à Jimmy, has just been published by Fayard in France. As the title suggests, it's essentially an homage to James Baldwin in epistolary form. If you read French, you can check out an excerpt on Mabanckou's blog.
Crusader Talk
Over at Slate, Reza Aslan reviews two books that collect Osama Bin Laden's speeches, looking for clues as to the terrorist leader's arguments. The first is Messages to the World, translated by James Howarth and edited by Duke University professor Bruce Lawrence, and the other, newer volume is The Al Qaeda Reader, edited and translated by Library of Congress scholar Raymond Ibrahim. Here's a quote from Aslan's review:
[F]ar from debunking al-Qaida's twisted vision of a world divided in two, the Bush administration has legitimized it through its own morally reductive "us vs. them" rhetoric.By the way, earlier this year, the Boston Review published an excellent essay by Khaled Abou el Fadl about the Lawrence book, which you can still find online here.
In the end, this is the most important lesson to be learned from these writings. Because, if we are truly locked in an ideological war, as the president keeps reminding us, then our greatest weapons are our words. And thus far, instead of fighting this war on our terms, we have been fighting it on al-Qaida's.
Don't believe me? Ask Bin Laden:Bush left no room for doubts or media opinion. He stated clearly that this war is a Crusader war. He said this in front of the whole world so as to emphasize this fact. … When Bush says that, they try to cover up for him, then he said he didn't mean it. He said, 'crusade.' Bush divided the world into two: 'either with us or with terrorism' … The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouths.Odd, indeed.
August 06, 2007
On Naming
Manuel Muñoz, whose short story collection The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue was recently short-listed for the Frank O'Connor prize, has a pretty cool op-ed in the New York Times about the politics of naming. Here's an excerpt:
It’s intriguing to watch “American” names begin to dominate among my nieces and nephews and second cousins, as well as with the children of my hometown friends. I am not surprised to meet 5-year-old Brandon or Kaitlyn. Hardly anyone questions the incongruity of matching these names with last names like Trujillo or Zepeda. The English-only way of life partly explains the quiet erasure of cultural difference that assimilation has attempted to accomplish. A name like Kaitlyn Zepeda doesn’t completely obscure her ethnicity, but the half-step of her name, as a gesture, is almost understandable.You can read the piece in full here.Spanish was and still is viewed with suspicion: always the language of the vilified illegal immigrant, it segregated schoolchildren into English-only and bilingual programs; it defined you, above all else, as part of a lower class. Learning English, though, brought its own complications with identity. It was simultaneously the language of the white population and a path toward the richer, expansive identity of “American.” But it took getting out of the Valley for me to understand that “white” and “American” were two very different things.
August 01, 2007
Jaggi on Khouri
I missed this piece when it appeared in last weekend's Guardian Review, until a reader kindly sent me the link: Maya Jaggi's profile of Elias Khouri. Here's a snippet:
Khoury may be well placed to assess the aspirations and tensions among Palestinians in Lebanon's 12 camps, who remain "in closed ghettos, separated from Lebanese society". As a young Lebanese at the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut in the 1970s, he spent years gathering from refugees their personal histories of the mass expulsions that attended the creation of Israel. He felt the stories should be given to an Arab Tolstoy, and imagined himself in the role ("everybody laughed"), but says, "I never dared write it then because I didn't know how."More here.
Health Hazard
This is not the kind of thing you want to learn when you're printing draft after draft of your book: Office printers are 'health risk.'
July 27, 2007
New Everett
Percival Everett has a new novel out next month called The Water Cure, described by publisher Graywolf Press as the "chilling confession of a victim turned villain." Here's what they say about it:
Ishmael Kidder is a successful romance novelist. His agent is coming to visit her usually productive client. But Kidder’s eleven-year-old daughter has been brutally murdered, and it stands to reason that he must take revenge by any means necessary. The punishment is carried out without guilt, and with the usual equipment—duct tape, rope, and super glue. But how will he explain the noises in the basement to his agent? How does he know he has the right man?Everett read an excerpt from The Water Cure at last year's Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and I remember it vividly; it was a scene in which the father finds out that his daughter is missing, and goes to his ex-wife's house to wait for the police. Heartbreaking, terrifying, and yet at the same time laced with the usual Everett humor.
(Via TEV)
July 23, 2007
New Coetzee
I often get asked to name literary influences and favorite authors, and I've never quite figured out how to answer either question. Everything I read, experience, or witness influences my writing in some way, so it's difficult to say something neat and predictable, like "My writing owes a debt to X literary movement." And naming favorite authors is equally difficult because so few writers publish consistently significant books over the years.
One author whose books I often include in my 'favorites' list is J.M. Coetzee. I admire the breadth of his work (novels, criticism, translation), and it's something I aspire to myself. I love his use of language (I don't know if it's because he was trained as a linguist (as was I) that I am so sensitive to his choices.) I like that he never forgets that the story should always come first. Each book of his is a reason to celebrate, as far as I'm concerned.
Recently, the New York Review of Books published an excerpt from Coetzee's new book, Diary of a Bad Year (which will be released in December 2007, according to Amazon). The excerpt is, quite simply, incredible. I can't wait to get my hands on the novel.
Media, Old and New
I've been enjoying Paper Cuts, the book blog started by the NYT's Dwight Garner. It's varied, it's well written, and it's got a point of view. Now it looks like the Chicago Tribune has also joined the blogging world through Trib Books. Nice to see newspapers' book sections trying to reach readers via this medium instead of sitting back and accusing blogs of stealing their readership/lowering standards/putting them out of business/etc.
June 17, 2007
Department of WTF
So Salman Rushdie was finally honored with an honorary knighthood (he's Sir Salman from now on) and a Pakistani MP apparently thinks that this award justifies suicide attacks. In addition, the Pakistani minister for parliamentary affairs says that the honor "has hurt the sentiments of the Muslims across the world. " I'd love to know what qualifies her to speak for Muslims across the world. My God. Can you imagine if Rushdie ever wins the Nobel? The loonie fringe will probably blame him for everything from the Iraq war to the fighting in Gaza. Enough.
Lost Fathers
Edwidge Danticat has an op-ed in the New York Times about the cost of a recent immigration crackdown on families all over the United States. Do read it.
June 14, 2007
'I Do Not Judge...But I Do Pose The Question.'
A few months ago I received a copy of Dave Eggers' new novel What is the What, and, after leafing through it, I set it aside to read later. Except that later never came. Something about the book made me uncomfortable, and the encomiums it has received in the press haven't really changed my mind. London Review of Books contributing editor Thomas Jones expresses that disc