Laila Lalami

“Paul A. Toth’s two books — 2003’s Fizz and his most recent one, Fishnet, published this summer by Bleak House Books — are underappreciated,” Jackson says. “I’ve read both and I couldn’t deny my gut instinct: that they remind me of cubist paintings. Depicting worlds far from realistic, his books nonetheless capture the essence of the human struggle of reality versus our individual perceptions of it. Just like a cubist painting. I thought I was nuts.

“Then I read that Toth considers Paul Klee “a major influence” on his writing. I no longer considered myself nuts; Toth, on the other hand…

“Actually, in both Fizz and Fishnet, Toth creates characters who remain likeable despite (or perhaps because of) their deep flaws. Like a cubist painter who puts all of a portrait subject’s physical characteristics on the canvas — front, back, top, bottom, etc. — Toth shows the different sides of his characters by juxtaposing contradictory thoughts and descriptions within the same paragraph, sometimes even the same sentence. In doing so, he captures common yet complex emotions, such as the conflict between blissful ignorance and isolating, paranoid self-consciousness. His books feature darkly comic storylines told with a deft ironic tone, yet both books cover such familiar, relatable human ground that they are ultimately reassuring.”

Tom Jackson is Associate Publisher of the literary journal Night Train. He is also an advertising copywriter/PR specialist and an award-winning filmmaker, once taught himself how to type in Russian, and talks a far better baseball game than he plays. This photo of Tom is the one his wife Deb (Night Train’s Circulation Manager) keeps in her wallet.

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

The Guardian says that Hitler was the best-selling author of the last century. Mein Kampf was sold, never given away, and Germans were essentially “required” to own it.

Miscegenation is in, says the Daily News.

The announcement was made earlier this month that Albanian author Ismail Kadare had won the Man Booker International Prize for his body of work (the award is given to deserving authors writing in English, or translated into English.) Kadare got to pick up his trophy in person in Edinburgh on Monday. There is coverage all over the place, including the BBC, the Herald, and the Scotsman.

I remember reading Kadare in French years ago, but I’ve never read anything of his in English. It wasn’t until I read one of the Lit Saloon’s many posts about the prize and the author that I realized why that might be. There are few translators from the Albanian to the English, and so Kadare’s work is in fact retranslated into English from the French, by David Bellos. You can read this essay by David Bellos over at the Complete Review, in which he talks about the problems of twice-removed translation, and in which he also explains how the Librairie Artheme Fayard and Albin Michel own the copyright to Kadare’s work.

Kadare himself has chosen Bellos to receive the translator prize associated with the International Man Booker, so one assumes he was happy with how he was translated. Kadare’s latest book in English is The Successor, which will be published by Canongate in the UK.

It’s been six months. The death toll stands at 178,000. More than 2 million people have been made homeless (yes, million). And what does the print press have to say? The Washington Post doesn’t have anything at all about the grim anniversary. The NY Times relied on Reuters and AP releases. (Maybe all their staff writers were busy reporting on Tom Cruise.) And CNN, which was quick to send that smug-faced anchor of theirs all the way to South Asia for the tragedy, has only bothered with one article.

The picture below is from Post Secret, a website that collects postcards sent in by people who want to share a terrible secret with the world, under the cover of anonymity. I hadn’t visited the site in a while (it’s updated only once a week) but I was prompted to do so again after a mention on another blog. The secret below seemed oddly appropriate for today:

I don’t think this person’s secret is unique. It’s a truth that many, many people in this country would probably admit if they, too, could put it on an anonymous postcard. So then why are talking heads acting all shocked that America is now less popular than communist China?

A controversial biography of the Prophet, written by one George Bush (distant, distant relation, says the White House), in the last century, has been authorized for distribution by the powerful and often belligerent Al-Azhar in Egypt. Al-Azhar is a religious university that has the power to censor particular books in the republic, so I was a little surprised that they gave the book a pass. (The book describes the Prophet as an “imposter” and Muslims as “locusts.”) Are the ulamas of Al-Azhar becoming more respectful of freedom of speech? Sure would be good news for novelists like Haydar Haydar. (But I remain skeptical.)

WH link from Lit Saloon.

My review of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter appears in the Sunday Oregonian. Here’s a snippet:

Part family saga, part chronicle of a tumultuous time in Mexican history, the novel is an enduring examination of the ways in which the divine and the logical come together, and how even the most reasoned people sometimes must surrender to the beauty of that which they cannot see.

Urrea has more than just a creative interest in this saint — Teresita’s real name is Teresa Urrea; she is his great-aunt. But this familial relationship is to the reader’s benefit: The story of the saint is told with such love and care that it will make a believer out of anyone.

I am far from alone in my praise of the novel. The Hummingbird’s Daughter has been collecting rave reviews so far. (See for example Marta Barber’s review in the Miami Herald and David Hiltbrand’s write up in San Jose Mercury News.) You can also check out this post, by Los Angeles writer (and frequent Moorishgirl.com contributor) Dan Olivas, and read his interview with the author:

DANIEL OLIVAS: One of the things the rave reviews keep on mentioning is the fact that your novel is based on a real person–your aunt. Why did you decide to fictionalize her life rather than attempt outright biography?

LUIS ALBERTO URREA: The simplest answer is you can’t footnote a dream. The book has taken many forms over the years of research. But fiction kept asserting itself. I think the magic of fiction is that in many ways it’s more true than non-fiction. By that I mean that fiction can take you into truths of feeling and it lends itself better to the kind of trance that allows a reader to smell and taste the world I’m trying to evoke. Also, as a lifelong reader, I can say that I come from a generation where the great achievement was the novel. So, you know, I wanted to try to honor her with an attempt at a masterpiece. You never know if you’ve gotten there or not, but no guts, no glory.

So, do yourself a favor, and go read The Hummingbird’s Daughter.

The Financial Times continues to surprise us by its attention to books. Here’s their latest: A profile of British author Hari Kunzru, with this priceless quote:

I ask him how he feels about [his large advance] now - such deals can be a mixed blessing and it must have been a shock to those close to him. “Initially, with my friends, there was a certain amount of jealousy,” he admits in a drawl. “There was a general holding of breath as they waited to see if I was going to go all Puff Daddy. I had to be quite strict with my arseholery.” A laugh. “But I think, now, it has actually been good in a straightforward way. It has given me a place to live and a chance to write. The books have been critically well-received and when I meet journalists, by and large, we are talking about the work rather than the publishing story.”

I have yet to read either of Kunzru’s books, The Impressionist and Transmission.

Strange Times, My Dear is the most important book to be published this year in the United States.

You might wonder why I’m using such a strong statement for an anthology of contemporary Iranian literature, rather than one of the 100,000 other books of fiction being published in 2005. The reason is simple: This book represents a major win against those who think that writers from “Axis of Evil” nations should have to apply for a license to get their works published here, against those who consider a Nobel Peace Prize winner such a threat to American readers that she could not publish her book in the States, against those who think freedom of speech is negotiable with the government.

Last year, the rules imposed by the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) made it necessary for Arcade Publishing to go to court to get Strange Times, My Dear published. This, in one of the world’s largest democracies. Co-plaintiffs in the case were the Association of American Publishers, the Association of American University Presses, and PEN American Center, whose president, Salman Rushdie, a man who knows a thing or two about freedom of speech, contributed a letter of support. And OFAC backed down.

The first review of the book I’ve seen so far is this one, by Christopher Byrd for The American Prospect, and it’s largely positive:

Although Strange Times, My Dear is not wholly free of the blemishes usually found in anthologies, it succeeds on the primary level of hastening one to delve deeper into its chosen subject area. And, on a civic level, it heroically assists to demystify a people seldom viewed in the United States outside the lens of geopolitics. Yes, there are excerpts that feel like excerpts, such as Esmail Fassih’s “Sorraya in a Coma.” This story allows the reader to overly empathize with the protagonist’s position of waiting in the intersection between where one is and where one is headed. While other entries feel too slight, for example Ghazaleh Alizadeh’s tale of bureaucratic blitheness, “The Trial” or Manuchehr Atashi’s poem “Visitations.”(..)

In contrast with these samples, which make up a negligible part of the book’s contents, the greater portion is composed of selections that advance like a vanguard of hypnotists contracted by the original works. Hushang Golshiri’s “The Victory Chronicle of the Magi,” which describes the hypocrisy that bedevils people and revolutionary movements, provides one of the many “aha!” moments in the book. Or, in variance with the tendentious reversal of connotations in “Visitations,” there are exquisite lines of poetry that make all the more tired the bemoaning of poetry in translation.

The anthology features poetry and prose, and includes brief bios on all the authors chosen. Contributors include Mahmud Dowlatabadi, Hushang Golshiri, Shahrnush Parsipur, Abbas Kiarostami, and Roya Hakakian, among many others. You can buy a copy at Powell’s or B&N.

But what still troubles me is that, even with this gained freedom, American publishers simply are not eager to put out books in translation. Consider this: Last December, the Association of American Publishers offered $10,000 grants to publishing houses interested in releasing three Iranian novels in translation here in America. Even with the subsidy, there have been no takers so far, Poets and Writers reports. So the next time people start bitching about the insularity of the Middle East, they’d better be careful with their own glass houses. It’s a fucking worldwide disease.

The Saturday Guardian features an incredible essay by Salman Rushdie (or Uncle Salman as we like to refer to him around these parts.) In it, he poses the question: “What is a fact?” and trots out answers that various factions in the so called “war on terror” might provide.

I have some sympathy with all three “biases”. Self-investigation followed by self-exoneration is never convincing. However, it’s hard to work up genuine sympathy for a failure of niceties towards people who would never consider upholding such niceties in return - to stick up for the human rights of people who despise the idea of human rights. And yet the growing evidence of ugly behaviour is distressing in the extreme, not because of the injury to the detainees, but because of the injury to ourselves, to our identity as free and moral people living “under law”, to our sense of what we stand for and who we are; and that identity is, or should be, something that conservatives and liberals should both be determined to defend.

And then he quotes Marti. Go read the essay here.