The shelver at Seattle’s University Bookstore (“I am the shelver. I shelve books.”) has posted a photo he took at last week’s Bumbershoot festival of Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill, and, uh, me. Hmm. Someone needs to figure out how to use a digital camera.
A reminder to readers in the Knoxville area: I will be reading tonight at the University of Tennessee. Here are the details:
Laila Lalami, author of this year’s Life of the Mind book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, will speak on Wednesday evening, September 13, at 7:00 in Cox Auditorium, Alumni Memorial Building. Her presentation will be followed by a booksigning.
More here.
Last weekend, Martin Amis published a long essay in the Observer about the “Age of Horrorism.” I have a response of sorts up on the Guardian Comment Is Free. Here is an excerpt:
Radical Islam is wholly deserving of the contempt that Amis shows it, and yet I remain unconvinced by his assurances of respect for Islam. Indeed, most of his essay is couched in classic “clash of civilizations” rhetoric, using terms that have become so hackneyed in our global culture as to lose meaning. Amis argues that the world has entered “an age of terror,” where the West, a place “where there are no good excuses for religious belief,” is under threat from the east, a region where “almost every living citizen…is intimately defined by religious belief.” Furthermore, the specific culprit within the east is “Islam,” but within the west it is “30 years of multicultural relativism.”
You can read more here.
This week, Seattle writer Valerie Trueblood contributes a column about Swiss writer C.-F.Ramuz. Valerie’s first novel, Seven Loves, came out this summer from Little, Brown. She is at work on an essay about the fiction of Ramuz, a book of dog stories, and a second novel.
In July, it got so hot in Seattle–a near-100-degree, breathless, un-Pacific-Northwest heat–that I thought of a novel I used to love, and took it off the shelf and read it again: The End of All Men. It made a hot night even longer. It’s not a book to take your mind off global warming.
The great Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, who wrote of life on the steep pastures of the Swiss Alps, published Présence de la Mort in the twenties. Here we waited until 1944 for a translation, The End of All Men. Ramuz has been compared to Hardy for his depiction of rural life, but his barely individualized characters are no kin of Tess and Jude. Hardy would recognize the way their fates dog them, but fate, for a character in Ramuz’s disaster novels, is nothing deserved or tragically earned, it’s a blow dealt straight from earth and sky onto the body. Reading Ramuz is an exercise in giving up ideas of human cause and effect, and feeling the rumble of tectonic plates. But the humans are there, tiny figures living lives of great particularity on the ground-and somehow we want to go along on their hopeless errands. What is to become of them, these men and women in whom character is beside the point?
David Friend’s Watching the World Change is a collection of photographs and commentary about iconic immages from the September 11 attacks. You can view a few of them here, and listen to an interview with him and some of the people who took the photos on NPR.
I’m in Knoxville, Tennessee, this week, to attend a couple of events for UT’s Life of the Mind program. The entire class of 2010 was assigned my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, to read over the summer and to discuss during fall welcome week. So many young minds, so little time.
Novelists Elias Khouri and A.B. Yehoshua talk to NPR about the July/August war in Lebanon and Israel. Worth checking out.
Two reviews of Ngugi wa Thiong’o's Wizard of the Crow appeared this weekend, and both were notable for engaging with the novel on its own terms. In the Washington Post, Aminatta Forna acknowledges didactic lapses in the novel, but she also points out that Ngugi’s work is read aloud in public spaces in Kenya, in the Gikuyu language. (Consistent with Ngugi’s stance for most of his career, the book was written in Gikuyu first; he then translated it into English.)
In the New York Times, Jeff Turrentine gently questions Ngugi’s claim that he wanted “to sum up Africa of the 20th century in the context of 2,000 years of world history.”
Given that Africa — where some 900 million people live in more than 50 different nations, each with its own history and culture — can hardly be treated as monolithic, one assumes Ngugi means to detect and tug at the common loose thread that has led to the unraveling of so many African states since they began claiming their independence after World War II.
And indeed it appears that’s what Ngugi is doing in the book.
Ian Buruma’s new book, Murder In Amsterdam, is a chronicle of the killing of Theo Van Gogh by a Dutch Islamist, and an examination of its effects on the political and social scene in the Netherlands. Christopher Caldwell’s review in the New York Times reveals some interesting details, but unfortunately also lapses in the usual ridiculous exaggerations one has come to expect:
Buruma interviews two charismatic reformers: van Gogh’s collaborator Hirsi Ali and the Iranian-born legal scholar Afshin Ellian. Both believe that nothing short of dragging Islam through the wringer of skepticism and ridicule, as Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers did Catholicism, will suffice to disarm potential militants like Bouyeri. But Buruma is skeptical. He suspects that many of those who invoke the Enlightenment are merely defending a conservative order. “Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church,” he writes, “while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.”That is unfair. Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him. We need a much more flexible definition of the word “minority” in a world thus networked.
The vast majority of the “billion enemies” that Caldwell is talking about here have no clue who Ayaan Hirsi Ali is. She may be famous in the Netherlands, Somalia, and in conservative circles here in the States, but that does not mean she is elsewhere in the Muslim world. In addition, most of the “billion enemies” he imagines do not yet have ready access to the Internet (must one mention the higher priorities of food, clean water, and health care?) It is doubtless that Hirsi Ali has enemies, but claiming that she risks having 1 billion of them, i.e. the entire body of Muslims, is beyond ridiculous.
Hisham Matar, whose debut novel In The Country of Men, was recently longlisted for the Booker Prize, has a little vignette at the Guardian about a visit to Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo two years ago. An interesting excerpt:
I asked a question that immediately exposed me. I shouted in his ear: “How do you see writers such as myself, Arabs who write in English?” He said nothing and continued to look straight ahead. Feeling awkward in the silence I pressed on. “Do we belong to Arabic literature, or the literature of the language in which we write?” Words like “we”, “belong”, suddenly seemed weightless.“A writer serves the language he writes in,” Mahfouz said unequivocally.
A few of the gathered nodded in agreement.
I felt annoyed at myself, at my naked soliciting of an embrace.
I have a forthcoming essay about this very question. More soon.
