Laila Lalami

Jeff Bryant of the Syntax of Things and Trevor Jackson of Creekside Review asked a number of book bloggers which writers they thought were deserving of great attention. The results are compiled here, and include a brief paragraph from the nominator, along with relevant links for those of you who are curious to know more. Among the underrated writers selected, you’ll find Jim Ruland, Kirby Gann, Salvador Placenscia, Blaise Cendrars (!!), Stephen Dixon, Tayari Jones, and Maureen McHugh.

“As far as I’m concerned, everybody in America should read Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea. It strips the ugly political rhetoric around immigration and reveals the very human face of this issue. The book came out in 1993, but I think it’s more relevant today than when it was published. More than sociopolitical analysis, though, Urrea has created a heartbreaking, tough and compelling narrative in this collection of essays. (Try to read the section titled “Father’s Day” without crying. I dare you.) This work is a testament to survival, and to hope, but never becomes sentimental. Urrea is a storyteller to be envied and emulated.”

Samantha Dunn is the author of Failing Paris, a finalist for the PEN West Fiction Award in 2000, and the memoir, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life, a BookSense 76 pick. Her most recent memoir, Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex and Salvation, is published by Henry Holt & Co.

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

Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in the New Yorker in the fall of 1997, is reprinted this week, and you can read it at the NYer site. The film adaptation, directed by Ang Lee, has been getting major accolades over the last week.

Update: Read my review of Brokeback Mountain here.

The Los Angeles Times‘ Ashraf Khalil and Jailan Zayan explain why Al-Shamshoon, the Arabic-language version of The Simpsons, may not be the big hit its producers hoped it to be:

Omar doesn’t drink beer. That is not a misprint.

Instead, he spends time with his buddies at a local coffee shop. At home, he pops open frosty cans of Duff brand juice.

Needless to say, Simpsons fans in the Middle-East are none too pleased:

“They managed to make one of the funniest shows ever into something that is terribly unfunny, and one of the smartest shows around into something incredibly dumb,” ranted an Egyptian blogger who goes by the name Sandmonkey and who wants the show canceled. “Us Simpson lovers can’t take this abomination any longer.” (..) “What’s Homer without beer?” Sandmonkey told The Times, preferring to be identified by his blogger name. “This is a fundamental issue!”

A couple quoted in the article have found a way to enjoy the show, however. They “dissect the translations, recall the originals and debate what jokes do or do not work in Arabic.” D’oh!

The Whitbread Award, which has in the past honored the work of writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Seamus Heaney and Andrea Levy, has lost its sponsor. The reason:

One of the literary world’s most prestigious prizes is looking for a sponsor after Whitbread pulled out of the awards it has funded since 1971. The company, once Britain’s best-known brewer, has decided literature does not fit with its status as a wide-ranging leisure conglomerate.(…) A spokeswoman for Whitbread said the decision would officially be announced this week.

“We no longer sell products or services that carry the Whitbread brand, so it is no longer appropriate to fund an award to promote the Whitbread name,” she said.

Says the Lit Saloon: “This is the obvious problem with including a sponsor’s name in a prize-name and not getting any sort of real commitment from the money-givers.”

Survivors of the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that rocked Pakistan last October were burning books to stay warm. As many as 10,000 books were destroyed before the army intervened.

Related: Unicef distributes winter clothing to survivors. You can donate money here.

Did you read Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review of Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle-East? (The review requires registration. Use bugmenot.com for a free login.) Take a deep breath, let me walk you through it. Here’s how it starts:

Even those of us who are not optimists by disposition have to admit that there are good reasons for being cheerful when we look around the world today.

Why, yes, we’re governed by an idiot, our civil rights are going to hell, poverty is on the rise, we have global warming, we’re in the process of rolling back women’s rights, we’ve invaded a country we had no business invading, but other than that, everything looks just peachy. Moving on:

North America and Western Europe enjoy peace and prosperity unimaginable by historic standards, and if the picture is less rosy in Latin America, and often tragic in Africa, then one must admit that whatever happens in those places doesn’t threaten global stability.

No matter that hundreds of thousands have died or are dying in conflicts in Congo, Angola, Namibia, or Somalia, never mind the continuing genocide in Darfur, forget the civil war in Colombia, set aside all the AIDS death in South Africa. As long as Wheatcroft and his people are OK, then the world is OK. But, wait, there’s more:

And now Japan is being joined by China and India in an explosive economic development (with whatever untoward social and environmental consequences) that may yet make this the Asian century.

Because, really, who cares about those social and environmental consequences? Fuck the environment, fuck the journalists rotting in jail, fuck Tibet. As long as he has his cheap, Chinese-made toys, he’s happy. Oh, wait, there’s a problem:

There is, in fact, just one region on earth that gives grounds for the deepest gloom. We unhelpfully call it the Middle East, although what’s really meant is Western Asia, the area between the Mediterranean and the Indus, bordered in the north by the Black Sea, the Caucasus and desert, in the south by the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. That region is in the throes of a historically immense, pathological crisis whose character we only partly understand, although we can perceive easily enough that what is already perilous may turn catastrophic, and could yet engulf us all.

See, I didn’t realize that the earth revolves around the Middle-East and America. They left that part out of my geography classes in high school.

If you’re curious what this provincial preamble has to do with Robert Fisk’s book, well, you’re not alone.

Carl Fussman interviews Salman Rushdie for Esquire, using some sort of elicitation exercise. A sample:

I left college in 1968, and “Midnight’s Children” was published twelve years later. In between, I was essentially floundering about. I worked in advertising two or three days a week in order to have the other four or five to stay home and write. Advertising was very tempting because they were constantly trying to bribe me to do it full-time. When you’ve had no success as a writer, the bribes start looking good. You start thinking, Who am I kidding? I think I want to be a novelist, but I’m not getting anywhere, and meanwhile here are these people offering me a comfortable living to do something that I actually can do. “Don’t be an idiot!” a voice says. The thing that I think was very brave of my younger self was that he decided he would be an idiot. Just persevere. That feels brave to me: deciding that I’m going to damn well be this person that I’ve set my heart on being.

If you had to pick one book from the last sixty or seventy years, you’d probably pick “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

I’ll tell you what divorce hasn’t taught me. It didn’t teach me not to get married again.

Did he have to recline on a couch? I want to know. More along those lines here.

Few movies have the power to engage me beyond the two hours I spend in the theater, but Syriana was one of those. Stephen Gaghan managed to create a fictional world whose complexity, for once, comes somewhat close to the complexity of real life. It’s hard to describe the plot of Syriana, perhaps because the movie doesn’t have one, in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, it gives us several storylines that interweave together to create a story.

Here’s the best I can do: An oil-rich Gulf state decides to sell its oil to the highest bidder, which in this case happens to be China. The deal is signed by the heir to the throne, Prince Nasir (played by Alexander Siddig). A Geneva-based analyst (Matt Damon) believes that the prince is right to apply principles of a free market economy and offers his services. But the American oil company who had hoped to land that deal isn’t too pleased; its CEO (Chris Cooper) wants to complete a merger with another oil company, and having the prince around isn’t so good for their business. The merger, however, is sure to ignite a Justice Department investigation, so a lawyer (Jeffrey Wright) is hired to do due diligence (the kind of diligence where you work out who’s going to take the fall to preserve the merger.) The young men who work in some of those oil rigs are fired at the whim of the deals being made or unmade, and two of them, hoping for three square meals a day, join a madrasa led by a blue-eyed cleric (Amr Waked). The government, of course, has stakes in the lost deal as well, and needs to make sure that oil is cheap and abundant for American consumers, so a veteran CIA man (George Clooney) is sent to Beirut to take care of things. An informant changes sides and turns against one of his contacts. And on and on.

The characters in Syriana are neither good nor bad; they do things out of greed or idealism, out of fear or desperation, each of them only aware of the particulars of their own situation. But in fact everything is connected, everything has consequences beyond those they see. And so the result is the continuing chaos we find ourselves in. The movie is not without fault (in particular, I think it could have given even more depth to some of the storylines) but I really liked it.

BTW, I should say how amused I was to spot Morocco everywhere in this movie: There’s Casablanca, substituting for Beirut; and, look, there it is, substituting for Teheran; and, oh, there’s the refinery port substituting for a Gulf port. I also drove Alex crazy pointing out all the veteran Moroccan actors playing bit parts. You just can’t take me to the movies.

Dan Wickett selects Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits for his list of best books of 2005.

An excerpt from HODP appears at Chapter Log, a new site that features first chapters from several new releases, including Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George, Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners.

An interview with me aired a couple of weeks ago on KPFA’s Voices of the Middle East and North Africa. You can stream it online here.