Laila Lalami

Thanksgiving sprung up on me this year, and I didn’t even have the time to wish you all a happy holiday before being whisked away by my amazing sister (and wonderful cook) and put in front of a Gargantuan meal. So, happy belated Thanksgiving to you all, and welcome back. This week will be short for me, as I get ready to go to New York for a quick visit to family and friends. I’ll also be on a panel about blogs, more about which perhaps a bit later this week. Until then, you can read the usual medley of links, commentary, reviews, rants, and recommendations.

The Booker Prize, which usually translates into a sales bonanza for the selected work, has failed to have that effect on this year’s winning novel, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Only four weeks after the announcement, the novel has disappeared from the list of best-selling original fiction. Mark Sanderson theorizes that “lyrical descriptions of gay sex and a return to the heady days of Thatcherism must have failed to whet the appetities of some readers.” But Michael over at Literary Saloon suggests that the “labelling of it, in headline after headline, as a ‘gay novel’ probably didn’t help.”

Sam Jones offers up this tidbit from a Newshour interview with Philip Roth that essentially repeats the pronouncements made by V.S. Naipaul a few weeks ago:

JEFFREY BROWN: Why do you think it’s become one of the great lost causes of our time?

PHILIP ROTH: My goodness. Um, oh, I don’t think in twenty or twenty-five years people will read these things at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not at all?

PHILIP ROTH: Not at all. I think it’s inevitable. I think the… there are other things for people to do, other ways for them to be occupied, other ways for them to be imaginatively engaged, that are I think probably far more compelling than the novel. So I think the novel’s day has come and gone, really.

Now you’re on notice. Better finish the Great American Novel before long.

What’s hip? John Leland’s written a book to explain what it is and NPR’s Rene Montagne has an interview.

Two articles published today about slain writer/filmmaker Theo van Gogh offer rather different perspectives about the case. In Salon, Ronald Rovers presents van Gogh as an advocate of free speech, one who saw his insults as a right in a democracy. Interestingly, the piece leads with the repeated mentions of the murderer’s national origin (italics mine).

On the morning of Nov. 2 in a busy street in east Amsterdam, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri pulled out a gun and shot controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was riding a bike to his office. Van Gogh hit the ground and stumbled across the street to a nearby building. He didn’t make it. As the Moroccan strode toward him, van Gogh shouted, “We can still talk about it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it.” But the Moroccan didn’t stop. He shot him again, slit van Gogh’s throat and stuck a letter to his chest with a knife. He was slaughtered like an animal, witnesses said.

It’s a little odd, considering that (a) the murderer is named here (so he could simply be referred to as ‘Bouyeri’) and (b) that the murderer was born in Holland, and was therefore Dutch. Compare this to the Alternet article by Naeem Mohaiemen, which instead focuses on some of van Gogh’s previous projects and what they meant for the culture.

Longtime readers of Van Gogh’s weekly column in the Dutch newspaper “Metro” know very well that his intention was not to reform male chauvinism, but rather to express crude bigotry. In his columns and interviews, Van Gogh called Muslims “goat fuckers” and “the Prophet’s Pimps.” His latest book, which lampooned Muslims as backward obscurantists, was defiantly titled “Allah Knows Best.” His collaborator on “Submission,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was equally florid, calling the Prophet Mohammed a “pervert” and a “tyrant.” Theo Van Gogh’s attacks were not limited only to Muslims. He blithely attacked Christian and Jewish symbols, once saying, “It smells like caramels they must be burning Jewish diabetics.”

The murder of Theo van Gogh was an unspeakable crime of hatred by a fanatic, but the writer/filmmaker’s own hatred toward others should not be conveniently forgotten now for the sake of political agendas.
Previous posts about van Gogh: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

“I just finished The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan,” Tinti says. “It’s amazing the best book I’ve read in a while. I heard O’Nan give a reading from it at the Brattleboro Literary Festival in October. Since The Night Country was one of the few books of O’Nan’s that I hadn’t picked up yet, I bought a copy to read when I got home. It turned out to be the perfect Halloween novel: A group of five teenagers are in a terrible car accident in a New England town. Three of them are killed. Two survive. Now here’s the cool part the book is narrated from the point of view of the dead teenagers. It sounds impossible to pull off, but Stewart O’Nan handles it brilliantly. His writing is just plain beautiful, heartbreaking and threaded with sharp black humor. The story picks up year later the first anniversary of the crash Halloween, of course, and the ghosts are zipping in and out of people’s heads. Then it gets really exciting one of the living teenagers, Tim, is planning on re-creating the crash, killing himself and the other survivor, a boy named Kyle who is now brain-damaged. Throw into the mix Officer Brooks, the policeman trying to stop it from happening again, and Kyle’s mom, whose life has been turned upside down by her son’s disability, and you have an emotionally gripping, white-knuckle countdown literary thriller.”

Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, was published by the Dial Press in March 2004. She is currently the editor of One Story magazine.

I finally got around to update my woefully anachronistic blogroll, so please do check out the fine sites listed on the right. For instance, take a look at Bookangst’s posts about whether ads sell books (short answer: yes) and a recent success story from an author whose book wasn’t neglected, underpublicized, or remaindered (the story you’re more likely to hear, these days, it seems).

Two French amateur Egyptologists (one a realtor, the other an architect) have challenged Egypt’s leading eminence on the subject of pyramids, the big Zee himself, Dr. Zahi Hawass. For two years, the Frenchmen have asked for permission to put a 15mm lens through a floor of the Great Pyramid at Giza, behind which, they believe, lies the burial chamber of Cheops (Khufu). After Hawass refused to grant their request, the amateur egyptologists went on a campaign to challenge his scholarship.

The Frenchmen’s challenge to the Big Zee’s authority has ruined the image of Egyptology as the gentlemanly pursuit of studied introverts. What has emerged since the Frenchmen went public in September with their accusations is a backstabbing world of academic ambition, national pride, tourism dollars and television ratings. “Dr Hawass treats Egypt as his private hunting ground,” says M. Verd’hurt, from Lyon. “They are speculators, amateurs!” comes the retort from Dr Hawass.

There is more to this fascinating saga, at the heart of which is essentially a struggle between modern-day Egyptians and foreigners on who gets to study what, where, and how, who funds the excavations, and in what language the results are published.

Randa sends a link to this essay by Daniel Akst, where he wonders whether current advances in technology might not allow computers to write fiction in the near future. Two programs are cited (Brutus 1 and StoryBook) and though the passages they’ve written aren’t earth-shaking, they’re still pretty decent. No need to worry, though, Akst says.

That no computer has yet written the Great American Novel may be because computers are subject to some of the same handicaps that afflict human writers. First, writing is hard! Although computers can work unhindered by free will, bourbon or divorce, such advantages are outweighed by a lack of life experience or emotions. Second, and all too familiar to living writers of fiction, there is no money in it. Unable to teach creative writing or marry rich, computers have to depend on research grants. And why would anyone pay for a computer to do something that humans can still do better for peanuts?

And, Akst says, while the passages make for amusing reading, they certainly don’t strike by the power of their imagination.

Tracy Daugherty, the winner of the 2004 Oregon Book Award for his novel, Axeman’s Jazz was interviewed by Dan Wickett last December. Dan also reviewed the novel on his site.