George Bush is said to be reading Albert Camus’ The Stranger while on vacation. How appropriate. A novel about a Frenchman who kills a nameless Arab for no discernible reason, by an author who once said of the brutal French occupation of Algeria: “Je crois à la justice, mais je défendrai ma mère avant la justice.” (“I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”)
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The adoption of U.N. resolution 1701 is cause for very cautious optimism. Both Israel and Hizbullah have agreed to a ceasefire, but of course it’s too early to tell whether it will hold. The very sad truth is that, from a strategic point of view, Hassan Nasrallah comes out of this horrendous tragedy at a huge political advantage: His fighters have sustained relatively few casualties; the large number of civilian deaths has resulted in an across-the-board surge of support for him; and disarmament is obviously thoroughly unenforcable. If he wished, he could now run for Prime Minister of Lebanon and win.
Meanwhile, Olmert’s popularity has been steadily declining since the first week of hostilities; he faces tough questions at home as to why the best trained and most funded army in the region could not defeat a few hundred guerillas; and no doubt Olmert’s opponents have been watching. It will be interesting to see what the political fallout will be.
For most people in the region, however, this war has no victors. On the Israeli side, 41 civilians and 108 soldiers were killed; and 300,000 people were displaced. On the Lebanese side, 1,130 civilians, 35 soldiers and 65 Hizbollah guerrillas were killed; and 1 million people were displaced. Lebanon has lost much of its infrastructure: Airport, seaport, roads, hospitals, and factories. All the bridges on the Litani river have been destroyed. And peaceful cohabitation has been set back another 20 or 30 years.
Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass has revealed that he served in the Waffen-SS during World War II.
The author, best known for his first novel “The Tin Drum” and an active supporter of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), said his wartime secret had been weighing on his mind and was one of the reasons he wrote a book of recollections which details his war service. The book is out in September.“My silence through all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book,” the paper quoted Grass as saying in a preview of its Saturday edition. “It had to come out finally.”
You can read the Reuters release here.
Regis Behe talks to Nell Freudenberger about her debut novel, The Dissident, which is released this week.
Freudenberger also explores ideas about the ownership of art and how it is verified. In the early 1990s, the Beijing East Village artist’s colony became known for its photography and performance art. When Freudenberger visited Beijing, she found not only that the low-rent artists’ residences had been torn down and made into a park, but that some denied its existence, despite books that were written about it.“It was interesting to think that if a few people feel that a place is there and they’re making work there, they’re referring to it as the East Village, it is there,” she says. “But for a lot of other people, it’s not significant enough to be a place. I guess ambiguous situations are what’s interesting in fiction.”
Freudenberger also discusses the question of creating art with characters from a different culture than her own.
Noam Chomsky, José Saramago, Eduardo Galeano, Gore Vidal, Arundhati Roy, Russell Banks, Thomas Keneally, Toni Morrison, and ten other writers have signed a petition against the current war in the Middle East.
The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner–and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis–there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.That this “kidnapping” was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources–most particularly that of water–by the Israeli Defense (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.
Read the rest here.
Several people have sent me the link to the George Galloway appearance on Sky TV. Galloway did a good job rebutting the anchor’s assumptions. But what a sad thing that we must rely on a guy who praises Syria’s Asad to stand up for the Lebanese and the Palestinians. God, how I miss Edward Said.
This week, I’m giving away a copy of T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk, which just came out last month. Of the novel, the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles wrote: “Talk Talk grabs hold of the fragile structures that establish who we are and what we own and shakes them apart. Considering Boyle’s recent subjects — sex research (The Inner Circle), hippies (Drop City), environmental apocalypse (A Friend of the Earth) — it’s remarkable that his most exciting novel yet should focus on the tedium of ruined credit scores and fraudulent drivers’ licenses. But Talk Talk benefits from Boyle’s highbrow/lowbrow style: He knows how to drill down through the surface of everyday life into our core anxieties, and he knows how to write constantly charging, heart-thumping chase scenes.”
As usual, the first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Boyle.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.
Update: The winner is Rebecca H. from Bethel, Connecticut.
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the very cool Los Angeles-based Levantine Cultural Center, Jordan El Grably is editing an anthology on the theme “Iconoclasts and Visionaries.” You can find details here.
Jess Row (The Train to Lo-Wu) examines the rather recent and rather disturbing tendency to approach gender roles from a decidedly traditional outlook (Caitlin Flanagan, Harvey Mansfied, et al.). Row wonders why these anachronistic tomes haven’t been met with other books, books that celebrate “contemporary relationships and gender roles without panic, dread, or shame.” So he turns to Iron John, by Robert Bly.
