Laila Lalami

Jose Saramago’s latest novel, Essay on Lucidity, is now out in Portugal. The book is about a right-wing government’s reaction to an election in which 83 percent of voters cast a blank ballot.

Saramago’s Portuguese publishers, Caminho, said the book will have a first print run of 100 000 copies, a record for a Portuguese novel. First editions of Portuguese books usually total just 5000 copies but sales of Saramago’s works have soared both at home and abroad since he became the first Portuguese author to win a Nobel prize for literature in 1998.

The novel doesn’t appear to be slated for publication in the U.S. at the moment.

Lizzie has another NYBTR review this weekend, for The Darkest Child. Check it out. Also, in the same issue is Peter Singer’s review of the new bio of B.F Skinner, and Ron summarizes why the NYT missed the boat on this one.

Nigerian playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka is profiled in the Sunday Observer* by Ken Wiwa. Soyinka is due to deliver the BBC’s 2004 Reith Lectures. The theme of the lecture is “The Climate of Fear.” (The first four lectures have already been recorded, the last will take place tomorrow at Emory University here in the States.) This last lecture is supposed to be about George Bush and Osama Bin Laden, whom the Nobel prize winner considers fanatics “of the same spore.” That isn’t going over so well with some people, and so Soyinka finds himself once again in the middle of a controversy. Yet, Wiwa says,

when Professor Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka speaks of fear we should listen. In a ‘Letter to Compatriots’ introducing his classic prison memoir, The Man Died, Soyinka wrote of ‘power profiteering from the common disaster and mutual sacrifice of war’. The war in question was the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970. Soyinka spent most of that conflict in a Nigerian gaol and although his recollections of the period are parochial, they contain universal reflections on the nature of fear. ‘The first step towards the dethronement of terror,’ Soyinka concluded in his letter, ‘is the deflation of its hypocritical self-righteousness.’

Soyinka was again in the news a few months ago, when he staged the play Ubu Roi (King Baabu) as a way of protesting Robert Mugabe’s reign in Zimbabwe.
*Thanks, David.

Jonathan Yardley talks about lesser known Roald Dahl works, those he wrote for adults. Among these is the short story collection Someone Like You, which is now out of print.

For the book lover in your life, consider this: J.B Miller’s Satanic Nurses, a book of literary parodies. The book is composed of short stories, written in the style of literary classics, but full of jokes that are apt to appeal to the literary crowd. Still, at least one reviewer remained underwhelmed:

The only problem with The Satanic Nurses, J.B. Miller’s smart-alecky book of “literary parodies,” is that you have to be uncommonly literate to get the jokes. You have to have read Hemingway, Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and Tom Wolfe, Tolkien, Rushdie, Salinger, DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, J.K. Rowling, and a couple dozen others. You have to demonstrate erudite, almost obsessively bibliophilic tendencies, and remember obscure details that really don’t amount to much: even if you’ve done your homework, you’re apt to become disappointed.

Sample stories include: Vladimir Nabokov’s Colita, Edward Albee’s Annoying Play W/ Dog, Toni Morrison’s Belabored, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Pest, and my favorite: Joyce Carol Oates’ List of Works.

Israeli scholar Joseph Sadan has put together a new collection of stories based on The Thousand and One Nights. The author has written an introduction and an epilogue that attempt to explain the origins of the mythical stories and their various forms.

However, first of all, we must understand the nature of the link between “The Thousand and One Nights” and this “freshly baked” collection in Hebrew. “The Thousand and One Nights” are a collection of tales that began to coalesce in the ancient (Oriental) world, was reformulated during the Ottoman period and became an integral part of European culture in the first half of the 18th century - that is, an integral part of the Western canon. Nonetheless, as the introduction informs us, a universally accepted canonical text has yet to be formed with respect to these tales because they are an anthology of stories collected under a single rubric, or, to put it in “Sadanese”: They are a “framework that, from time to time, changes its contents and swallows up various stylized batches of dough.” What is more, in addition to the various popular versions of “The Thousand and One Nights,” there is a chaotic wealth of anthologies bearing a similar style, which have been granted colorful titles such as “The One Hundred and One Nights,” “The Thousand and One Days,” and even “A Thousand and One Quarter-Hours.” This collection is thus an additional “Thousand and One Nights” anthology based on the well-known narrative framework concerning Scheherazade, a narrative into which [Joseph Sadan] has “stuffed” tales that he has collected from various sources and periods (from the ancient era to the Ottoman period).

You can read the full Ha’aretz review here.

Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah (where she lived from her birth to her teenage years) is getting back some of the author’s furniture. The home is also the site of a Spring lecture series. Another popular O’Connor site is Andalusia, the farm where she spent the last years of her life, raising peacocks and writing masterpieces of the short story form.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel has a profile of Dinah Lee K

Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties won’t come out in the UK due to fears that the Saudi ruling clan might sue the author for libel under Britain’s more stringent laws. Still, British readers can always order it on the Internet, and if the publisher can orchestrate a clever marketing campaign around the theme “the book the Saudis don’t want you to read” they should be able to sell one or two copies.
Bookseller link via Sarah.

Kitabkhana offers his perspective on the Shivaji-as-national-pride issue:

The thing is, Atal Behari Vajpayee is an honourable man. A while back, he’d obliquely criticised people who banned books and ravaged libraries, suggesting that they might choose to table their objections in more intellectual fashion. The thing is, it’s the elections and he’s campaigning in Maharashtra, also known as I Love Shivaji Central. The thing is, Laine hasn’t said anything defamatory, or even especially inflamatory, about Shivaji, in his book. The thing is, our honourable PM has done the crowd-pulling bit and slammed Laine in general, foreign scholars in particular, just to get that applause going. The thing is, if anyone else had pulled a volte face like that, I’d have had no hesitation in calling him a two-faced wuss who lacked the courage of his convictions and was only too happy to sell intellectual freedom down the river in pursuit of votes. But the thing is, we’re talking about Atal Behari Vajpayee here, and as everyone knows, AB Vajpayee is an honourable man. Isn’t he?

And if you care to read the article quoting Vajpayee, here it is.