May 02, 2008

Quotable: Ahdaf Soueif

If you've sat for baccalaureate exams anywhere in the Arab world, this little passage from Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun will bring about a bout of nostalgia (or perhaps panic, depending on your grammar skills):

The afternoon is the time for memorising and the morning the time for brainwork. Not that there is much brainwork to any of this. Arabic grammar is about the only thing that can count as brainwork, parsing sentences: the Deed, the Doer, and the Done-To; the Added and the Added-To; the Attribute and the State; the Circumstance of Time and Place and, most problematic of all: the Built upon the Unknown, in which the logical Done-To assumes the form and function of the Doer. These have to be worked out.

When is Soueif coming out with a new novel? It's been almost ten years since the last one.

April 04, 2008

Quotable: Joseph Conrad

From the second chapter of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, when Verloc first hears of Vladimir's plan to get the F.P. society to bomb a scientific institution of his choosing:

And Mr. Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent Mr. Verloc with inward consternation. He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organisation where in the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge. Once Mr. Verloc had opened his mouth for a protest, but the raising of a shapely, large white hand arrested him. Very soon he became too appalled to even try to protest. He listened in a stillness of dread which resembled the immobility of profound attention.

Does it, I wonder, remind you of someone?

February 26, 2008

Quotable: Salman Rushdie

Recently, I had my students read a couple of essays from Salman Rushdie's collection Imaginary Homelands. I particularly like these lines from "Is Nothing Sacred?":

What is more, the writer is there, in his work, in the reader's hands, utterly exposed, utterly defenseless, entirely without the benefit of an alter ego to hide behind. What is forged, in the secret act of reading, is a different kind of identity, as the reader and writer merge, through the medium of the text, to become a collective being that both writes as it reads and reads as it writes, and creates, jointly, that unique work, 'their' novel. This 'secret identity' of writer and reader is the novel form's greatest and most subversive gift.

This was originally published in Granta in 1990. If you're looking for something more recent by Rushdie, try "The Shelter of the World," which appeared in the New Yorker last week (or was it two weeks ago?), and is an excerpt from his forthcoming novel.

(Photo credit: Eamonn McCabe)

February 15, 2008

Quotable: J.M. Coetzee

I'm about half way through final edits for my new novel, The Outsider, and I am so tired these days I can barely keep my eyes open past eight p.m. While reading Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year the other day, I had to smile at this exchange between Señor C., an aging novelist, and Anya, the attractive neighbor he has hired to be his secretary:

A novel? No. I don't have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today.

Still, I said, we have all got opinions, especially about politics. If you tell a story at least people will shut up and listen to you. A story or a joke.

Stories tell themselves, they don't get told, he said. That much I know after a lifetime of working with stories. Never try to impose yourself. Wait for the story to speak for itself. Wait and hope that it isn't born deaf and dumb and blind. I could do that when I was younger. I could wait patiently for months on end. Nowadays I get tired. My attention wanders.

I love the comparison with Atlas. How apt.

February 08, 2008

Quotable: James Baldwin

A few weeks ago in my non-fiction class, we discussed James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son. Here is how the essay "Stranger in the Village" concludes:

One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Published originally in Harper's Magazine in 1953.

(Photo credit: Mottke Weissman)

January 30, 2008

Quotable: Chinua Achebe

From Achebe's second novel, A Man of the People:

Max began by accusing the outgoing government of all kinds of swindling and corruption. As he gave instance after instance of how some of our leaders who were ash-mouthed paupers five years ago had become near-millionaires under our very eyes, many in the audience laughed. But it was the laughter of resignation to misfortune."

The book was published in 1966.

(Photo credit: Frank May)

January 18, 2008

Quotable

From the opening chapter of The Year of Magical Thinking.

Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.
At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what happened, I considered adding those words, "the ordinary instant." I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.

January 09, 2008

Quotable

I finished reading J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello last night, an interesting, ambiguous, even perplexing novel. It's set up as a series of lectures that the character of Elizabeth Costello, a distinguished writer, gives at various locations (universities, conferences, even a cruise ship.) I was drawn to the character, and I also liked how her lectures dealt with so many different, important topics. And I think what I most liked about the book is that it defies classification or labels. Speaking of which, here's a little excerpt I underlined:

'Your handicap is that you're not a problem. What you write hasn't yet been demonstrated to be a problem. Once you offer yourself as a problem, you might be shifted over into their court. But for the present you're not a problem, just an example.'
'An example of what?'
'An example of writing. An example of how someone of your station and your generation and your origins writes. An instance.'
'An instance? Am I allowed a word of protest? After all the effort I put into not writing like anyone else?'

On a side note, I went to a chain bookstore the other day to get a copy of Diary of a Bad Year, but couldn't find it on the display shelves. I asked a clerk at the information desk, "Do you have the latest Coetzee?"
"Is that the title?"
"No, no, that's the author."
"Who?"
"Coetzee? The South African writer? Well, now he's Australian, but you know, from South Africa?"
"Oh" [Blank face.]
"You know, the guy who won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago."
"What's the title again?"

August 18, 2006

Quotable

"[A]buse is not sanctified by its duration or abundance; it must remain susceptible to question and challenge, no matter how long it takes."

Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile.

August 02, 2006

Quotable

"Pointless now to study or revise. Impossible to work. Impossible to do anything except chafe and fret and fight with Lateefa who now wants her children to remain in the inner living-room of their flat and not even sit - with the windows closed - in the outer rooms where the walls could fall in on top of them at any moment. Dada Zeina cannot come any more. She has to stay in her own home and look after her own children. No shops are open to be sent to buy anything from. To go to the club would be unthinkable. Apart from the odd phone conversation with a friend, the world has been narrowed down to the inner living-room. Even novels are no good any more: Asya opens Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and closes them again. Out there, there is the world and action and history taking shape. And in here: waiting, helplessness - paralysis."

Ahdaf Soueif, In The Eye of the Sun.

May 19, 2006

Quotable

From The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene:

I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income-tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead; one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come, the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward; the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

With the novel I'm writing now, I feel like I'm well into the stage where the characters have begun to live, and of course there's a lot of pleasure in this. But I still struggle with the fear that grips me whenever I sit down to write, the fear that I won't be able to move forward. So it's always nice to remember--or at least to hope--that the subconscious is always at work, and that progress may be right around the corner.

July 07, 2005

Quotable: Ursula LeGuin

From Ursula LeGuin's "Advice to A Young Writer":

To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

November 04, 2004

Quotable

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock ...

Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man. Take this, print it, tape it above your computer screen. Don't think for a moment that you should give up.

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