Laila Lalami

I’m off to Washington, DC for a couple of events on Thursday and Friday. If you’re in the area come on by and say hi. And if time permits, I’ll try to post some re-caps.

Voodoo Heart
Scott Snyder
Bantam Dell
276 pp.

The men in Scott Snyder’s debut collection of stories Voodoo Heart, are running–either away from constricting lives or after the objects of their affections. Each yearns deeply for that which is beyond his reach.

In “Blue Yodel,” a man drives his Model T across the country in pursuit of the blimp which carries his girlfriend away from him, toward the West Coast. The reader can only guess why the girlfriend has left him. Perhaps it’s the intensity of his feelings for her–feelings he describes as “an exhibit on hydroelectricity he’d seen at a fair.” The chase, which lasts through the whole story, serves as an apt metaphor for the ultimate surrender to the unknown course of love.

Snyder’s men possess the innocence and curiosity of children, and this sense of youthful wonder and outrage at the world is the very thing that endears the reader to them. The narrator of “About Face,’ has an appealing naiveté. Miles Fergus is twenty-nine, well-meaning but unlucky. He’s given a community service job playing the horn for troubled boys after a good deed goes wrong. The camp’s director enlists Miles’ help in driving his ill daughter to her treatments, and the reader is swept along with Miles as he begins to believe in a happy ending, but as in many of Snyder’s stories, happy endings aren’t so much a possibility as an anomaly.

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As has been widely reported elsewhere, this year’s IMPAC Dublin award has been awarded to Colm Toibin for his novel, The Master.

“If you just look at who has won it before, you think, ‘God, I would really like my book to be in that list’,” Toibin said.

The author, who was serving as the Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University in California when he learnt of the award, said he will return there in 12 months’ time.

“I’m going to take a year to get a new novel written. The great advantage of this is it really frees you, the money,” he said.

Previous winners include Orhan Pamuk, Tahar Ben Jeloun, and Edward P. Jones.

Zaman Online reports that Turkish novelist Elif Shafak (The Saint of Incipient Insanities) has, like Orhan Pamuk earlier this year, been accused of “insulting Turkishness”:

Ultra-rightwing Turkish Lawyers Association Chairman Kemal Kerincsiz, who is infamous for filing complaints against journalists and authors in the country, has filed a complaint against author Elif Safak for her book “Baba and Pic” (Father and Offspring).

Kemal Kerincsiz, who has sued famous Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and ethnic-Armenian writer Hrant Dink, has now also accused Elif Safak of ‘insulting Turkishness’ – over remarks made by Armenian characters in her latest book.

And this kind of ridiculous harassment is likely to continue as long as there is Article 301.

I’m always behind on everything I want to do, so I have only an anthropological interest in the species known as “slacker,” which is the subject of Tom Lutz’s new book, Doing Nothing. Apparently these slackers are here to stay. “They arise in force, [Lutz] suggests, whenever there are major social changes taking place. They are also clowns and jesters, who reveal the illusions we cherish about the work we do. They are the counterforce against which workers must contend, sometimes even within themselves.”

I hate gimmicky travel books, but I have to say I’m intrigued by Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between. It’s the story of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002, with nothing more than a walking stick and a backpack. Call it bravado. Or foolishness. In his NYT review, Tom Bissell had this to say about it:

If, finally, you’re determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. “The Places in Between” is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.

One more to add to the list.

John Gray’s review of Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West : How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond makes me very curious to read it. The book is about the fluidity of cultural frontiers, and how cultures change in response to (peaceful or violent) contact with one another, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Here’s a snippet:

In a brilliant chapter Mishra observes that one of the central aims of India’s 19th-century anti-colonial movements was to invent Hinduism as a religion. As part of building a modern Indian nation that could resist and overthrow British rule, the Hindu elite simplified and remoulded India’s unfathomably rich inheritance of beliefs and practices into something resembling a western creed. Like Shinto in Japan, Hinduism as it figures in Indian politics today is a byproduct of an encounter with the west. In order to resist western domination, Asian peoples have found themselves compelled to copy them. As Mishra observes, India’s anti-colonial elites “denounced British imperialism as exploitative, but even they welcomed its redeeming modernity, and, above all, the European idea of the nation – a cohesive community with a common history, culture, values and sense of purpose – which for many other colonised peoples appeared a way of duplicating the success of the powerful, all-conquering west.” The result has been to exacerbate sectarian divisions, and create them where they did not exist before.

And in an op-ed piece in the same paper, Mishra argues that China and India made important gains when they adapted parts of the free market economy and rejected others.

Economic reforms in the 80s focused on boosting export-oriented industries on the coast. They made China a huge sweatshop for the west’s cheap goods and gave it an average annual growth of 10%. It may be tempting to credit the invisible hand of the free market for this, but, as in the so-called “Asian tiger” economies, the Chinese state has carefully regulated domestic industry and foreign trade and investment, besides maintaining control of public services.

More here.

What do Muslim women want? According to this NYT article, a new Gallup poll revealed that:

When asked what they resented most about their own societies, a majority of Muslim women polled said that a lack of unity among Muslim nations, violent extremism, and political and economic corruption were their main concerns. The hijab, or head scarf, and burqa, the garment covering face and body, seen by some Westerners as tools of oppression, were never mentioned in the women’s answers to the open-ended questions, the poll analysts said.

Concerning women’s rights in general, most Muslim women polled associated sex equality with the West. Seventy-eight percent of Moroccan women, 71 percent of Lebanese women and 48 percent of Saudi women polled linked legal equality with the West. Still, a majority of the respondents did not think adopting Western values would help the Muslim world’s political and economic progress.

While I’m not the least bit surprised about these findings, I do wish the article gave more details.

The Gallup survey, “What Women Want: Listening to the Voices of Muslim Women,” does not appear to be online at all, but with some Googling, I found this other report, which reveals that the survey covered only eight Muslim countries: Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But there are plans to cover as many as 39 majority-Muslim countries, so that’s a good start.

Just when it seems that the administration makes a step forward, like getting that fucker Zarqawi (not that it will change the situation in Iraq or return the hostages he’s taken, but hey, I’ll take comfort wherever I can get it at this point), it takes two steps back. This past weekend, when two Saudis and a Yemeni committed suicide at the prison that shame forgot, a Gitmo camp commander declared that the men “committed an act of war” against the U.S. How monumentally arrogant and soulless do you have to be to say something like that? I mean, seriously?

There’s a very interesting article in Le journal Hebdo about a round-table that took place in Rabat about the use of Darija, the vernacular language of Morocco. Writers, poets, linguists, artists, and rappers took part in the debate, i.e. all those for whom language is an essential means of creation or scholarship. I was quite pleased to see a few misconceptions discussed and cleared up during the debate (e.g. the ridiculous idea that somehow Darija is not a proper language because it is not written. Piffle.) So hopefully this is the precursor to a wider national debate about the issue. I’m fully in favor of using Darija, because of the huge impact it would have on the creation of a reading culture. Imagine: All children’s books right now are in Modern Standard Arabic, which is a language no one learns until first grade (i.e. age 6 or 7), by which time reading habits are already in place for many kids.