Laila Lalami

Over at The Head Heeb, Jonathan Edelstein has a very thoughtful post about Sharon’s decision to quit Likud, and what it could mean for Israel, and for Palestine.

The formation of a centrist party will be the second step in the political realignment that began with Amir Peretz’ victory in the Avoda primaries. Just as Avoda’s passivity has been replaced by pro-peace and social-democratic activism, the Likud as we know it is coming to an end. Instead of being several parties in one, the Likud will once again be the party of the nationalist right. The next election will see a fairly clear choice between three parties, each representing a different approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Peretz’ vision of a negotiated peace, the Sharon list for further unilateral withdrawals, and the Likud for maintenance of the status quo. The factions also seem ready to break down along economic lines into social democrats, populists and neoliberals, although the latter two will be represented on both the Sharon and Likud lists.

Read it all here.

A controversial bill that was introduced in Britain last June would make it illegal to say or write anything that might offend people of any religion. The bill came under criticism because its vague wording would quite likely threaten free speech. In response, PEN has recently published a collection of essays, titled Free Expression is No Offence. You can read excerpts from the contributions by Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie in the Guardian. Here’s a snippet from Monica Ali’s contribution:

What’s the problem here? I think there are many but I want to set them out in three broad areas. The first concerns the differences between race and religion as far as free speech is concerned. It is not in the faintest way plausible to vilify a particular race and to claim that no harm is intended towards members, individually or collectively, of that racial group.

Religions, on the other hand, are sets of ideas and beliefs. They should not be privileged over any other set of notions. I am not bound to respect the idea that I may be reincarnated as an insect or a donkey or that Jesus is the son of God or anything else that I regard as mumbo-jumbo. Indeed, if there are aspects and practices of a religion that conflict with my own notions and beliefs (of fairness and justice and so on) then the moral onus is on me to speak up against them. If I loathe the fact that Islam has been used to deny the right of women in Saudi Arabia to vote then I ought to say so.

Read it all here.

Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my views on the novel and its relation to the world at large, so I quite appreciated Walter Mosley’s essay in the Washington Post this weekend, in which he says of the writer’s task:

The mastery of language is our duty. We enter this world by placing one word after another in comprehensible and unique ways. And then, of course, there’s what the author is willing to talk about. When politics enters our writing, we are often asked by our representatives, our teachers, and sometimes our audience to step back from outspoken and controversial opinions about how this world works. Many times I’ve been told by people I respect, “There’s too much emphasis on race in this book,” or “The government and the police aren’t really like that.”

I am asked not to stand down but to stand back — behind the line of good taste.

“Books are entertainments,” I am told. “No one wants to hear your ideas about how the world works or what’s wrong with America.”

Of course they don’t. The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink. If writing was always only a good adventure with a teary or cheery ending, books would not be worth the effort to read or to write.

Novels are about the world we live in. No one is suggesting that they should be propaganda for oil companies and fast food concerns. Or there to justify unjust wars or the American Way. Nor should they be apologies for anarchic maniacs who seek in their distress to destroy an entire world. But to the extent that these things are in our world, we should write about them.

Read the rest of this excellent essay here.

At the Guardian, Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana writes about what Fallujah was (and continues to be) like:

The photograph of an elderly Iraqi carrying the burned body of a child at Falluja, widely shown during the chemical weapons controversy of recent days, is almost a copy of an earlier one that Iraqis remember – from Halabja in March 1988. Both children were victims of chemical weapons: the first killed by a dictator who had no respect for democracy and human rights, the second by US troops, assisted by the British, carrying the colourful banner of those principles while sprinkling Iraqis with white phosphorus and depleted uranium.

The Falluja image is emblematic of an unjust occupation. We read last week that US troops were “stunned by what they found” during a raid on a ministry of interior building: more than a hundred prisoners, many of whom “appeared to have been brutally beaten” and to be malnourished. There were also reports of dead bodies showing “signs of severe torture”. Hussein Kamel, the deputy interior minister, was “stunned” too. This feigned surprise is a farce second only to the WMD lie. Torture has continued as under Saddam’s regime in detention centres, prisons, camps and secret cells well beyond Abu Ghraib.

I urge you to read the full article here.

Jonathan Lethem writes an appreciation of Italo Calvino for the NYTBR.

Calvino, it seemed to me, had managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic. Calvino, with his frequent references to comics and folktales and film, and his droll probing of contemporary scientific and philosophical theories, had encompassed motifs associated with brows both high and low in an internationally lucid style, one wholly his own.

More here.

Have you heard the latest on the riots in France? Apparently, it’s all because of polygamy. So say Nicolas Sarkozy, Bernard Accoyer, and even Hélène Carrère d’Encausse (further proof that being a member of the Académie does not preclude you from making utterly stupid statements.) Here she is, quoted in the Times:

Referring to the problem of African immigrants in France, she told Russian television in Moscow on Sunday, “Everyone is astonished: Why are African children in the streets and not at school? Why can’t their parents buy an apartment? It’s clear why. Many of these Africans, I tell you, are polygamous. In an apartment, there are three or four wives and 25 children.”

All I can say is: The people of Utah better watch out. Rioters are coming.

Chris Wiegard reviews Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Alan Cheuse reviews Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits for NPR’s All Things Considered. Click here to listen.

Tonight, sometime between 6 and 7pm, I’ll be on KBOO discussing my book, the recent news in Morocco and France, and all my other pursuits.

If you’re not in the Portland area you can listen online.

A profile of me appears in the latest issue of Bookselling This Week. Enjoy.