A major Tintin exhibit, put together by a lifelong fan, will soon leave France for London. The museum’s curator gives the maritime details in the Herge classic high marks for verisimilitude. No word, though, on Herge’s portrayal of colonized people.
The Atlantic has a profile of General John Abizaid (under the lame title “Abizaid of Arabia”) in their December issue.
John Abizaid graduated from West Point in 1973, ranked forty-second out of 944 in the class that just missed Vietnam. Above his yearbook photo is the cryptic caption “The ‘Mad Arab’ came from the deserts of the West to become a star-man”
on cutesy names like “momoirs.” Here’s an article on what Generation-X can teach us about parenting, which is to say, not much that you couldn’t figure out on your own.
Taslima Nasreen, who had to flee Bangladesh after the publication of Lajja, has a new book out, Ka, a thinly veiled authobiography. This time she’s in the cross-hairs of fellow author, who was upset that she portrayed him as taking two women to a guesthouse and leaving drunk (the horror!). The book’s distribution was stopped after that author filed suit. But now, Nasreen is being thanked for her courage by an unlikely group: the religious party IOJ. Nasreen is currently a fellow at Harvard.
Does a standing ovation count when you pay for sixty of your closest friends to be in attendance? (Link via Moby) We like you Stephen, we really do. And you didn’t even have to buy us dinner.
Scott Spencer talks about the thrills of being nominated for the National Book Award, for A Ship Made of Paper. (The other finalists are T.C. Boyle, Shirley Hazzard, Edward P. Jones and Marianne Wiggins.) For Spencer, the accolades are great, but not nearly as exciting as publishing his first book
”I’ve had a lot of really good things happen to me in my career, but I don’t think I’ve had anything that meant as much to me as having my first novel published,” he said, leaning forward slightly in his armchair. ”It was like having my identity validated. I got my ticket punched, I wasn’t going to be asked to leave the room.”
Martin Amis has a tribute to Saul Bellow in the December issue of The Atlantic.
The American novel, having become dominant, was in turn dominated by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated that: Saul Bellow. His was and is a pre-eminence that rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to waste your breath.
Amis talks about the preoccupations of Saul Bellow’s characters, and adds:
Of course, the Jewish-American novel subsumes the experience of the immigrant, with an “old country” at one remove; and the emphasis is on the anxiety of entitlement (marked in Roth, too, and in Malamud). It is not an anxiety about succeeding, about making good; it is an anxiety about the right to pronounce, the right to judge
I spent the day trying to get over my cold but had time to finish reading The Namesake. I had enjoyed Interpreter of Maladies and so I’d been waiting for this book with great expectation. But The Namesake disappointed me. The book is exceedingly well-written and the characters carefully drawn and very engaging. Still, I found that the numerous descriptions sometimes substituted for plot and that certain writerly tics (lists, for example) became obvious in this longer work, whereas they weren’t in the short stories. Next up is The Margaret-Ghost by Barbara Novak.
Maud is sick. Old Hag is sick. And I’m sick. The simultaneity of our symptoms is further proof that we’re all part of a literary cabal.
It took twelve years to write, but Virginia Stuart stuck with it. She was working on a tale of three Danish sisters who rescue Jews during the holocaust, and now at age 89, she just published the novel.
