Laila Lalami

“Last year I went through a Polish phase,” Alarcón says. “At one point I was doing some serious ethnic profiling, buying almost every book I came across by an author with a Polish surname. Janusz Anderman, Tadeusz Borowski, Bruno Schulz, Maria Kuncewicz, Jerzy Andrzejewski and of course, Ryszard Kapuscinski. I’m not really sure how to explain this, and I can’t really remember how it began. It’s a strange way to come to know a country, a people, a culture-necessarily incomplete of course, especially given that my knowledge base of Polish history is limited to what I learned in high school and whatever I picked up the summer I stayed with a friend in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. But I don’t really know any Polish folks, have never been there, don’t speak the language-but what struck me was how much I recognized in the work. They say that winners write history, but losers write the literature: I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Poland has lost quite a bit throughout history. My own country-Peru-has done its share as well. Maybe that’s what I recognized: the dark humor, the fatalism, the savage beauty of the prose and the strong, unflappable, acidly funny people these authors described. Everything. I won’t lie. I loved all of it. These writers could be Peruvian, I thought. What’s more, I wished they were. We have our own masters, but still.

The novel that has stayed with me most is A Minor Apocalypse by Tadeusz Konwicki. The copy I found at University of Iowa Library was from an old one, but it turns out it has been re-released by Dalkey Archive Press (God bless Dalkey Archive Press) in an the same excellent Richard Lourie translation. I don’t think I’ve ever read a funnier, sadder, stranger novel. When the novel opens, a older man, a writer, is visited by some Communist dissidents: you’re done, they say. You’ve accomplished all you’ll ever do, probably more than you could have hoped, but let’s face it, you might as well kill yourself. They propose he set himself on fire in front of the Congressional building that evening, in protest. The writer agrees to spend the day thinking it over. And so he does, and we follow him as he half-heartedly prepares for his death, writes his last will and testament (which is outrageously funny) and wanders around a crumbling, chaotic Warsaw that is as much a character as any in the novel. Bridges collapse around him, no one seems to know if it’s warm for fall, or cold for spring-but everyone agrees the weather is very, very strange. People stroll onto the scene, disappear, the action and dialogue is almost continuous with very few breaks. Everything is negotiable, everything is unstable, as the narrator gets drunk, falls in love, avoids friends, makes enemies, and prepares for the inevitable. It’s trite to say that I didn’t want this book to end, but it’s true. Konwicki is the real deal.”

Daniel Alarcón is the author of the story collection War by Candlelight.

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

Michael Cunningham will be reading from his new novel, Specimen Days, at Powell’s tonight. Details:

Tuesday the 21st at 7.30 pm
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W Burnside

I’m actually going to drag myself out of the house for this one, so come by and say hi if you’re there.

You can listen to Alan Cheuse review the book on NPR. Here’s also the SF Chronicle review.

The NY Times profiles Helen Oyeyemi, the young Nigerian author whose first novel, The Icarus Girl, was released to much acclaim in the U.K. earlier this year. Here’s a snippet:

“We didn’t understand that we could be in the stories,” she said of herself and her other classmates of color. “Or that people like us could be in the stories.”

“I never got particularly good marks for the stories I wrote,” she continued. “And I read them over. And I started to see that in a fundamental sense they weren’t true. Not only were they just not very good technically in terms of the writing, but there was something missing.”

Only when Nigeria came into her stories did things ring true, she recalled. She met Nigeria, so to speak, through the novel “Yoruba Girl Dancing,” by Simi Bedford, about a Nigerian girl in London dealing with assimilation issues. “We didn’t understand that we could be in the stories,” she said of herself and her other classmates of color. “Or that people like us could be in the stories.”

“I never got particularly good marks for the stories I wrote,” she continued. “And I read them over. And I started to see that in a fundamental sense they weren’t true. Not only were they just not very good technically in terms of the writing, but there was something missing.”

Only when Nigeria came into her stories did things ring true, she recalled. She met Nigeria, so to speak, through the novel “Yoruba Girl Dancing,” by Simi Bedford, about a Nigerian girl in London dealing with assimilation issues.

The Icarus Girl is now available in the U.S.

Several MG readers have written in to draw my attention to Alan Riding’s profile of Nedjma, the pseudonymous author of The Almond, an erotic novel set in Morocco, and which is coming out with Grove/Atlantic this month. (By the way, the book was also reviewed together with Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries.) Clearly, the NY Times doesn’t want you to miss this book. It’s got Muslim women! And sex! And mysterious pseudonyms!

There are two components to this hoopla that I find by turns amusing and troubling. One is the attempt at titillation by juxtaposing the stereotype of the covered, submissive Muslim woman with promises of revelations about what happens behind the veil. This, I am used to, and no longer care. But the other is the claim that this novel is some sort of landmark. It is not.

And now it appears that the author herself cultivates this image:

She said that even though she never expected the book to be published, she wrote it in French because it seemed less shocking to write about sex in a language that is not her mother tongue. “In any event, if I’d written in Arabic, it would never have been published,” she said. “Nor will it. It’s a thousand years since Muslims have written openly about sex. If you find an Arab publisher, I’ll buy you a bottle of Champagne.”

Clearly, Nedjma hasn’t read any of the sexually explicit material in works by Ahdaf Soueif or Alifa Rifaat or Nawal Al-Saadawi (all of whom have been published or translated into Arabic, thankyouverymuch.) And since she appears to be familiar enough with Algerian literature to use the title of a novel by Kateb Yacine as a pseudonym, she should also be familiar with Algerian writer Assia Djebar, whose work has also dealt with sexuality very openly. And that’s just for women. I can think of plenty of men, as well, starting with Mohammed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and so on.

Despite my griping about the book’s presentation and reception, I am actually looking forward to reading it and seeing how it fares as a book of fiction (since that is what it is.) I managed to get a copy of it at BEA (one of the few I brought back with me) and look forward to checking it out for myself.

Dan Wickett, of the Emerging Writers Network, files the first review of my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, over at his site. He also asked me for an interview, and you can read our exchange here.

Algerian writer Assia Djebbar has joined the ranks of the Academie Francaise this year. (For those unfamiliar with the body: it’s got 40 members, the vast majority of whom are white men, not all of them writers by vocation, and their role is vaguely defined as “watching over the French language.”) I remember as a kid reading (in Paris-Match, of all places) that Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman to be elected member. (In 1980. I mean, seriously!)

I love Assia Djebbar’s work, and I can see how this is a huge honor for her, but it strikes me as slightly ironic (though unremarkable, perhaps) that she is now charged with protecting the language of her country’s previous colonizer. On the other hand, ‘francophonie’ isn’t going away anytime soon, and if millions and millions of North Africans are going to speak the language, then they might as well be represented in the body that produces the ultimate resource on French–Le Dictionnaire. Maybe she can get them to put the word “Beur” in it.

Those unfamiliar with Assia Djebbar should really check out L’amour, La Fantasia, which is available in English.

Link cribbed from Lit Saloon.

The August 2005 book festival in Edinburgh is already getting press–more than 500 authors will converge on the town for a fortnight. The Scotsman has further details (and a picture of a youthful-looking Salman Rushdie, sans beard.)

The Guardian asked a few writers and critics, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Monica Ali, Ian Jack, and James Wood for their summer reading recommendations. Richard Eye gives his vote to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel Desertion, and, having been fortunate enough to read the galley, I, too, would recommend it unreservedly. I also notice that Orhan Pamuk’s novels Snow and My Name is Red get many votes (including Doris Lessing’s), as does his latest work, the memoir Istanbul. Tom Paulin recommends Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries, which I also plan on reading very soon.

I was interviewed by the Portland Tribune for their “Person of the Week” feature, and the article came out on Friday, along with a picture of me looking slightly dazed and under-caffeinated. The article is available online, in case you’re curious. Here’s a snippet about the book:

The author part of the identity of Laila Lalami (pronounced LAY-la LA-la-mee) revolves around “Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits,” her fiction debut, due out in October from Algonquin Books. The work is set entirely in the Morocco she left behind before pursuing her master’s degree at University College London and her doctorate in linguistics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
“Hope” traces the lives of four illegal immigrants in a cramped dinghy heading by night across the eight miles from Africa to Spain. Their dinghy capsizes just short of the beach in Chapter 1. Then the action moves backward and forward in time, which sets up an interesting tension: We wonder how they fared at the same time as we learn what drove them to this desperate measure.
The details are foreign to the Anglo ear: children playing soccer in the slums, judges and school administrators who take cash bribes, a man who regularly beats his wife with an extension cord. There are inevitable references to the food of the poor and drinking mint tea, but there is no verbal luxuriating. The prose is spare and tight, and never descends into cookbookishness.
That’s partly because English is Lalami’s third language. Arabic is her mother tongue, while school was conducted in French. Like Joseph Conrad (the Polish novelist whose best work was in his third language, English), great things are possible for an emigrant who is an avid reader and dedicated writer.

I think I have a long, long, long way to go before I can be compared with Joseph Conrad. And, to clarify a bit on what the reporter wrote, I think I would have written a book (maybe not Hope) whether I’d come to America or not. I’ve written since I was a child, and that’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do. In fact, I suspect I probably would have finished a book sooner were it not for the distraction of getting a Ph.D. and having to adjust to writing in a language not my own. Then again, my readership if I’d stayed in Morocco would have been a lot smaller than here, so maybe things worked out that way for a reason.

It was a quiet weekend here at Dar Moorishgirl–laundry, reading, cleaning, reading, errands, and more reading. I did manage to make some progress on the novel and even catch up on some email (but please bear with me if I haven’t yet responded to your missive. I will soon.)