Laila Lalami

“Four years ago I reviewed Larry Brown’s book of essays Billy Ray’s Farm for the Atlanta Constitution,” Hays says. “The essays were about how Brown spent his time when he wasn’t writing, which was keeping up the family farm. Brown was a hand-hewn writer who wrote five novels and a nearly a hundred stories before he ever published a single story. By the time the essays came out in 2001, he had published seven books. In Billy Ray’s Farm, one saw that his life was a balancing act between writing and delivering calves or chasing down coyotes or corralling stranded catfish.
The essays were muscular, full of life, an active portrait of a writer in progress. The last essay in the book is about a cabin he had been working on for some time, whenever he could steal a moment from the farm.
When Brown died recently, the first thing I thought was, Now he won’t get to finish that cabin. I thought how his death cast the whole book in a starker, historical light. Instead of being there with him in those essays, I felt as if I was watching him through a darkening window. It made me wonder if a writer’s death can not only change how we read his work but can it perhaps transform the writing itself? ”

Tommy Hays‘s most recent novel is The Pleasure Was Mine, published by St. Martin’s Press. He reviews books for the Atlanta Constitution and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

Tom Reiss’ The Orientalist is reviewed in The Nation, but unlike the raves that have appeared in other major outlets, Daniel Lazare’s critical analysis takes into account both Reiss’s book and the book that started it all–Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino.

Nussimbaum is interesting as a case study, but is he really worth an entire book? Ultimately, the answer depends on our assessment of his literary worth. Reiss, who has clearly put an enormous amount of labor into this volume, writes that Nussimbaum’s dozen-plus works of nonfiction are still “readable” after all these years, while Ali and Nino remains “his one enduring masterpiece.” In an afterword to a recent edition by Anchor Books, Paul Theroux goes even further, comparing Ali and Nino to Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote and Ulysses–”novels so full of information that they seem to define a people.”

This makes Nussimbaum seem very important indeed. But is such lofty praise warranted? Not by a long shot. Overwrought and melodramatic, Ali and Nino is a minor bit of exotica that in ordinary times would be no more than a curiosity but, after September 11, is deeply repellent. Imagine a young Osama bin Laden crossed with Rudolph Valentino, and you’ll get an idea of the kind of hero–and values–the novel celebrates. Nussimbaum presents Ali, an Azeri khan, or chieftain, as a noble son of the desert: brutal, passionate and imbued with an Al Qaeda-like contempt for Western ways. Thus a chemistry textbook, in his view, is “foolish stuff, invented by barbarians, to create the impression that they are civilized.” Women have “no more sense than an egg has hairs,” while European law is contemptible because it does not accord with the Koran.

Related posts:
The Orientalist: Excerpt, Reviews, Questions, Interview
The Orientalist Report
The Orientalist Review

The BBC has a profile of Israeli writer Etgar Keret, whose collection The Nimrod Flip-Out comes out in Britain in March (it’ll be re-issued here in the States by FSG.)

The stories are subtly subversive, hinting at the pressure-cooker situation in which Israelis live without ever descending into overt politics. Keret says that is intentional.

“I don’t want to represent the political reality, I want to show people who live in it,” he says.

“It’s like when you use a mobile phone, it affects the TV – it makes a noise. I want to talk about this noise, not the phone call.”

Keret tells the BBC journalist an anecdote I’d heard him say before, and which I find hilarious:

And he recently appeared at a reading in France with Arab writer Sayed Kashua – where he discovered they had similar worries about the event.

“I’m always afraid of events in France. There’s always some pointy-chinned woman who stands up at the end and says: ‘You’re a baby killer, your hands are covered with blood.’

“And Sayed said: ‘I always get some guy saying: ‘You’re all suicide bombers, you have blood on your hands.’

“So I saw this woman in the crowd, she was nervous the whole time, and I was thinking to myself, that she was the one.

“And as soon as we were finished speaking she stood up and said: ‘This whole time I have been confused. Which one of you is the Israeli writer and which is the Palestinian?’”

Cracks me up every time.

The April issue of The Atlantic has a cover story by David Foster Wallace, about political talk radio. You can get a small glimpse of it here, but you’ll have to buy the issue to really get an idea of the thing. (Color-coded notes and asides, anyone?)

My favorite blog at the moment is the hilarious The Amazing Angry Talking Penis. Check it out, why don’t you.

That’s it for me this week. I will be taking a break from blogging for the next 3 weeks while I try to complete a draft of my novel in a very quiet place with no internet access. I’ve pre-posted a whole bunch of reviews, recommendations, giveaways, and guest columns, though, and Alex will step in from time to time with news items. The one and only Randa Jarrar will mind the blog on Fridays, as usual, so you will be in good hands, my friends. See you soon.

This week, I’m giving away the latest issue of The Baltimore Review, where my story “Better Luck Tomorrow” appears. If you’re curious about my forthcoming collection, this story is a good place to start. The magazine features the work of Dave Schuman, Terri Scullen, Anh Chi Pham, Nathan Leslie, Toby Tucker Hecht, and many others. I’ll send a copy to the first reader who writes in with his/her mailing address.

Update: The winner is R.G. from Lincoln, Nebraska. Congrats!

The finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award have been announced. They are:

• Jerome Charyn, The Green Lantern
• Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker
• Ha Jin, War Trash
• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
• Steve Yarbrough, Prisoners of War

Thanks to the indefatigable Dan Wickett for the link.

Marc Estrin, whose first novel was cited by critic Ron Charles as an underappreciated book a few weeks ago, has started a blog hosted at his publisher’s website. I imagine he’ll be talking about his new book, The Education of Arnold Hitler, about a young man who has the misfortune of sharing a name with a genocidal maniac.

A police chief in Mexico has found a novel way to improve his officers’ manners and make them “better people.”

Starting this month, [Luis Sanchez] the mayor of [Nezahualcoyotl] is requiring all 1,100 members of his police force to read at least one book a month, or forfeit career advancement. The cops will get reading lessons if they need them and can select the literature from a list of recommended books at a new library, ranging from “Don Quixote” to the latest crime novels by Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Why the emphasis on literature for police officers, 70% of whom have no more than eighth-grade educations? Sanchez believes that too many cops are rude to citizens and that by reading, they will become better mannered, more communicative and thus more welcome in the neighborhoods they patrol.

“Reading makes us better people, more sensitive, more able to express ourselves,” said Sanchez, a bibliophile with the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. “Better persons give better service.”

Frankly, so many methods have been used to try and improve police work in Mexico that I think trying literary education can only help (though I disagree with the compulsory aspect.) You can read the rest of the article, and some statistics on whether the program is working, here. If you hit a subscription wall, just go to bugmenot.com and get a login and password from there. (Thanks to Dan Olivas for the link.)

A propos of compulsory education, the only example that comes to my mind at the moment is how Saddam Hussein received an award from UNESCO in 1982 for dramatically improving literacy rates in Iraq. Of course, the punishment for not attending literacy classes was three years’ imprisonment, so I can see how that was a huge incentive.