All day I’ve had that Sesame Street song stuck in my head: In the library, you will find, books of every shape and kind, in the library, li-li-li-libraryyy! Now I know why: The town of Salinas, birthplace of John Steinbeck, will have no libraries next year. All three are closing, as part of a cost-cutting move.
I’m sure this has been linked to everywhere in the blogosphere, by writers and non-writers alike, but the NY Times has a piece about bloggers getting book deals. Salam Pax (Where is Raed), Jessica Cutler (Washingtonienne), Belle de Jour, Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette), and a few others are mentioned.
Whenever the NY Times does a piece on a book featuring Muslim characters (or, more rarely, written by a Muslim author) I can always expect a few laughs. It’s no different with this article on The Kite Runner, the best-selling tale of a friendship between two Afghan boys, written by physician-turned-novelist Khaled Hosseini.
Let me decode a few things for you (emphasis mine). Consider the opening paragraph:
Few aspects of this swank oceanside resort call to mind the harsh grind of daily life in Kabul, Afghanistan. Yet when a local book group met here recently to discuss “The Kite Runner,” the stunningly successful first novel by an Afghan immigrant, many group members said they felt they were reading pages out of their own lives.
In other words, readers of this novel can be assured of its ‘universality.’ Of course, I suspect that when Muslim readers are bombarded with the latest John Grisham or Stephen King, no one bothers to convince them that the characters have lives just like their own.
And in case you missed that opening paragraph, let’s repeat the lesson:
People who have read the book, however, speak almost exclusively of how they were touched by its universal themes. “There are so many basic human emotions at work here,” said John Tegano, a member of the Palm Beach group.
But wait, there’s more!
The reactions of the Palm Beach group suggest that [it will continue to sell for a year or two]. “I recognized so many things that happened in my time,” Ms. Campbell said, referring to the years she spent living in a French convent, a Jewish girl hidden away by the nuns as her parents and dozens of neighbors were deported by the Nazis. “What struck me about the characters here is that they’re all very human.”
Gasp! You don’t say! You mean they’re the same species as us?
All joking aside, I was concerned when I read that the original draft of the book had the Afghan protagonist marry an American woman, but the publisher thought that it was too “unbelieveable” and made Hosseini change the wife to an Afghan. Recently, author Jervey Tervalon revealed in an L.A. Weekly article that he was told by his black editor that unless he “changed the white, upper-class love interest of my black protagonist to something, anything else” he couldn’t get the book published. Someone should ring publishers and inform them that miscegenation is legal.
Kjell Espmark, the chairman of the jury that decides on the Nobel Prize for literature has stepped down after 17 years, and has been replaced by another man, Per Waestberg. With secrecy typical of Nobel judging, no reason was given for the change.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Emecheta Buchi, Ben Okri and 20 other writers were honored last weekend in Ibadan, as part of the celebrations for the “best 25 books written over the last 25 years” in Nigeria.
Jean Said Makdisi’s new book Teta, Mother and Me is reviewed in the Daily Star. It’s a memoir of three generations of women in the Said family (yes, that Said.)
[T]he book is much more than just a memoir – it is a discovery for both the author and the reader of a richer and more complex past for Arab women than both ever would have imagined.Using unpublished family documents, the memories of friends and acquaintances, and histories of the region and period, Makdisi traces her family’s personal story against the backdrop of political events as they take place in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and the United States. The story details her grandmother’s early childhood in Ottoman Syria in the 1880′s; her mother’s experiences of two world wars and their repercussions for the Middle East; and the author’s own experience of raising a family in Beirut, amidst the endless, futile, disillusioning fratricide of the Lebanese civil war.
Said Makdisi’s memoir is as yet unavaible here, but you can check out her previous book, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir.
Thanks to Jonathan for the link.
Reuters reports that OFAC is backing down.
“OFAC’s previous guidance was interpreted by some as discouraging the publication of dissident speech from within these oppressive regimes. That is the opposite of what we want,” Stuart Levey, Treasury’s undersecretary for the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said in a statement.“This new policy will ensure those dissident voices and others will be heard without undermining our sanctions policy,” Levey said.
The new rule allows U.S. publishers to engage in “most ordinary publishing activities” with people in Cuba, Iran and Sudan, while maintaining restrictions on interactions with government officials and agents of those countries.
Under the previous rule, a license was required to publish authors from embargoed countries such as Iran — a nation dubbed in 2002 as part of the “axis of evil” by President Bush along with Iraq and North Korea.
For the legally inclined, the relevant document appears here.
Was it the fear of being seen as opposing that freedom of speech martyr, Salman Rushdie? Or being publicly rebuked by Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi? Or the relentless work of activists, writers, publishers, journalists, and all others who have protested? Whatever the cause, OFAC’s backing down from the requirements of a license is a victory, though given their track record this past year, optimism should be tinted with caution.
Thanks to Hurree for the Reuters link.
When Sudanese author Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North was published in 1969, it was described by Edward Said as one of the ‘finest novels to be written in Arabic.’ Among other things, the story is a sarcastic retelling of Heart of Darkness: A man leaves his home, goes ‘native,’ and suffers the consequences, except this time, the journey is to the heart of Europe, where the narrator experiences violence and betrayal. The novel offered an alternative take on the issue of colonialism, and is probably one of the most important books of fiction to be published in the wider Arab world. It was banned in the Sudan for a long time.
Before poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to leave Cuba in 1980, he had tried on three separate occasions to smuggle a manuscript of Farewell to the Sea out of the island without success. While he was serving a prison sentence for the ‘crime’ of being homosexual, a guard burned Arenas’ manuscript right before his eyes. Arenas finally succeeded in publishing Farewell to the Sea, a lament on the lack of freedom to be, freedom to love, freedom to speak in post-revolutionary Cuba. He died before his book could be published in his native country.
Iranian novelist and feminist Shahrnush Parsipur was jailed shortly after the 1989 publication of her novel Women Without Men, which offered a frank depiction of women’s sexuality to a society that wants to repress it. It wasn’t the first time that Parsipur had been sent to jail for her writing. Despite the commercial success of some of her fiction works, all of Parsipur’s books have been banned at one point or another in Iran. She now lives in exile.
I am able to tell you these things because, as a citizen of a free nation, I have access to the works of these fine writers in translation. For this to be possible, someone had to buy the rights, get the books translated, edited, published, and distributed.
If these three books were to be written today, they would all but be banned in the United States.
While the new rules put in place by the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the Treasury Department do not (yet?) criminalize publication of books from countries under embargo (Iran, Sudan, Cuba), they prohibit U.S. publishers from editing, translating, or otherwise providing any ‘services’ to the authors. What OFAC is saying is that these authors should have had the forethought of being native speakers of English. And just because these people risk life and limb in their native countries for the right to speak doesn’t mean that they should be free to publish here in the States. After all, there are innocent American readers that need to be protected from evil-doer authors.
In a characteristically American response to this ridiculous situation, a lawsuit has been filed against OFAC by the Association of University Presses, the Association of American Publishers, Arcade Publishing, and PEN American Center. The text of the lawsuit contains a declaration by PEN’s president, Salman Rushdie, an author who knows all too well the price of freedom of speech.
And perhaps that is the biggest indication of how low we have sunk as a nation. That the man who, in 1989, had to defend his right to free speech from religious zealots, should in 2004 have to defend others’ right to free speech from OFAC zealots.
Stand with Rushdie, again.
“I just finished reading Josip Novakovich’s wonderful novel April Fool’s Day,” Mandelbaum says. “It chronicles the life of one Ivan Dolinar, a Croatian whose knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time makes him a useful guide to that hauntingly perverse pocket of the world, the Balkans. Spanning fifty-plus recent years, the book naturally devotes some of its attention to war and its horrors (in a particularly chilling scene, Ivan comes across the crucified body of a Muslim friend from medical school), but the novel’s main focus is Ivan’s struggle for survival and a meaningful existence. Novakovich’s vision encompasses the broadly philosophical and the minutely sensory; his voice is inviting and compelling, morally alert without being moralistic, and he never loses sight of what makes for a good story.”
Paul Mandelbaum is the author of Garrett in Wedlock, part of which appears in the Winter issue of Glimmer Train Stories. He also edited the anthology First Words: Early Writings From Favorite Contemporary Authors, including juvenilia by Margaret Atwood, Rita Dove, Stephen King, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Updike and others.
Kitabkhana rounds up some of the reactions to Salman Rushdie’s visit to Kolkata (Calcutta) this week:
Rushdie, with quote marks
Looks like the man’s being mobbed on his Kolkata visit. He had fun: “In America, we have to deal with strange growths called Bushes.” And so did the press. In which Salman chacha reveals that he wants to write a book on Machiavelli, Padma Lakshmi says that his new book has “a lot on cooking“, and one news report does its best to put Rushdie’s life and works into perspective. Grimus was “a science fiction”, and Rushdie also wrote “The Moor’s Last Sight”. And the anonymous author serves up the most entertaining review of The Satanic Verses yet: “The novel was a story of two Indian actors who fell on the Earth after an Air India aircraft exploded mid air. The book criticised terrorism.”
Hurree also weighs in on that most important of all lit questions: Who is hotter, Salman Rushdie or Brad Pitt?
