Lawmakers in the Nigerian state of Anambra have thrown their support behind Chinua Achebe’s refusal to accept his country’s National Honour of Commander of the Federal Republic. Two weeks ago, Achebe had said that, under Obasanjo’s leadership, the situation was “too dangerous for silence.”
In a paper to be presented at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre next month, Dr. Martin Lings will propose a new theory about the Bard–that he may have been a Sufi.
Lings argues that the guiding principles of Sufi thought are evident in Shakespeare’s writing. The plays, he believes, depict a struggle between the dawning modernist world and the traditional, mystical value system. And, like the Sufis, the playwright is firmly on the side of tradition and spiritualism. (…) The famous line of Prospero’s ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ is a complete fit, he claims, adding that King Lear’s words also eerily echo Sufi ideas when he tells his faithful daughter: ‘Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense.’ Lings makes the point that the Bard is ‘quite at home’ with ‘Gods’ in the plural.
Lings, who was once in charge of Koranic manuscripts at the British Museum, is also the author of Muhammad: His Life Based on The Earliest Sources, an excellent biography of the Prophet that I would highly recommend.
Observer link via Moby.
Jonathan Lethem’s latest book, the short story collection Men and Cartoons, enabled him to do some experimentation, he says in this interview with Regis Behe.
The short form provides Lethem with opportunities to experiment and work outside the restrictions of a novel. “Access Fantasy,” a fable about consumerism set in a world where cars clog the streets, is 22 pages set in a single paragraph. “The National Anthem” uses a letter to narrow the gap between two friends.
“That’s a really interesting piece for me, because I’ve never fooled around the epistolary form at all before,” Lethem says, noting one of the few books he’s read that has a similar construct is Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”
The book features the characters of Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude from Lethem’s earlier novel, The Fortress of Solitude.
When bootlegged versions of Bill Clinton’s My Life appeared in China a few people reported of a few “changes” made to the original text. An Op-Ed in the NY Times details a few of them:
The fake version reveals a Clinton family obsessed with China’s strong points, with how Chinese science and technology “left us in the dust.” Readers will learn that the future president, to impress Hillary’s mother, had rhapsodized about such things as the Eight Trigrams, documented in “The Book of Changes” several thousand years ago. Another retranslation of the pirated translation last summer has Mr. Clinton explaining to Hillary that his nickname is “Big Watermelon.”
More seriously, the fake versions also excise references to lack of freedoms in China. You can read the rest of “Bill Clinton’s Fake Chinese Life” here.
The NY Times has an interesting article about Spain’s effort to integrate its Muslim (mostly Moroccan) population under the new Zapatero regime. Crucial to this effort is ensuring that financing for mosques comes from local sources, rather than foreign ones, particularly Saudi. Some are citing the separation of Church and State as an argument against government subsidies, but others point to the fact that Catholic clergymen receive salaries from the Spanish government. Spain’s ability to fully integrate its Muslim population seems to me to depend on whether it can start by having fair practices.
Alice Walker has been a bit out of touch lately, but this review of Evelyn C. White’s biography of her is a nice reminder of some of her earlier work, breakthroughs and breakdowns.
A posthumously published novel, written by Irene Nemirovsky, an emigre Russian Jew in France during World War II, is quickly turning into a phenomenon. Titled Suite Francaise it is an epic told in five volumes. The first book is an account of the exodus of 1940, when the Jews fled the Germans; the second is a study of a small village under the occupation, including the treacheries of collaboration. Other volumes are yet to be published. Nemirovsky wrote i>Suite Francaise while in hiding in a small village in the 1940s with her family. She was deported and died ten days after arriving in Auschwitz, but when her daughter fled their home she took the manuscript with her. It was only recently that she finally decided to transcribe it. The results are said to be extraordinary.
“One of the great 20th century authors … A gigantic literary and historical gift,” said the daily La Croix. “A work of exceptional force … remarkable because written not after, but during, the war,” said L’Express. “A suberb work … A capital discovery,” said the Le Point weekly. “A chef-d’oeuvre … ripped from oblivion,” said Le Monde.
Foreign rights to the book have been sold in some 18 countries, including the United States, so we’ll soon have a chance to read it here.
The New York Times covers the Man Booker celebrations and I was getting quite impressed that people were so interested in a literary prize until I got to this line.
In years past, the Booker acquired a reputation for fierce infighting and very public feuds over nominees and winners. But this year there was little of that, and at Soho House the Toibin and Hollinghurst factions mingled relatively easily. It may have helped that most people admitted to not having read the books at least not yet.
Ah then, never mind the book. Just tell these people whom they’re supposed to adulate.
Good news, kids. I’ve asked the one and only Randa Jarrar to appear as regular Friday blogger on Moorishgirl, and I’m delighted to announce that she has agreed. Randa’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Sex and the Umma, and Eyeshot. She won the Million Writers Award earlier this year. She outlines the difficulties of writing her first novel (mainly procrastination in the forms of single motherhood, trailer living, food, Namco, excessive moving, a punk rock plumber, Kafka tattoos, and a homeless SCA guy) in the current issue of Kitchen Sink. She also has stories in Dinarzad’s Children, the first anthology of Arab-American fiction. She lives in Austin, Texas, where her days are spent revising, fantasizing about November 3, playing poker with her kid, and making strangers feel uncomfortable. So, please stop by and say hi to Randa tomorrow. I’ll be back next week.
Here’s an interesting article by Jordan Rosenfeld about how the recent OFAC rules about publishing material from “Axis of Evil” countries affect literature. Through her Translation Project poet Niloufar Talebi has been working on translating, editing, and publishing Iranian poetry here in the U.S. but the new rules have sparked concern about whether she’ll be able to continue. Still, she seems determined, and wants to eventually publish an anthology.
“I’d go with a publisher that wouldn’t fetishize the project for their ‘literature-of-color’ niche. I would also like a publisher that would be interested in starting dialogue in educational circles because that’s where we can plant the seeds of understanding.”
