Laila Lalami

A happy and healthy Eid-ul-Fitr to all my Muslim readers. Eid Mubarak.

A few days ago, I received two copies of the Dutch translation of my book, Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens. It was released earlier this month in the Netherlands, and it’s a very handsome edition, with nice, thick paper, and beautiful cover. I am looking forward to my visit to the Netherlands in January, when I will be doing a few public events.

For those of you who live in New York: The NBCC will be hosting a panel about representations of Islam tonight. The speakers are author and historian Tariq Ali and poet and translator Eliot Weinberger, which should be quite interesting. The discussion will be moderated by Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. The event takes place at 7 pm at McNally/Robinson Bookstore (Mulberry and Prince Street in SoHo.) For more information, call (212) 274-1160. And then email me and let me know how it went.

The Literary Saloon (one my favorite blogs) reports that the University of Rouen now offers a full transcript of the manuscript for Madame Bovary. You can see Flaubert’s text as he labored over it: words crossed out, verbs changed; descriptions refined. And you can see various drafts, the final draft, the copy edited version, and the published text of 1873. It’s really quite something.

This is what our living room looks like this morning–empty, except for a rug and a sad-looking plant. We’ve moved some of our furniture to storage, with the rest to go within the next couple of weeks, in preparation for the move eastward. Or westward, if you consider that Al-Maghrib (‘Morocco’) literally means ‘the land of the setting sun.’

I’ve been thinking about endings a lot, lately; I am working simultaneously on the last three chapters of my novel, so I suppose I can’t help seeing, or seeking, closure in other places as well. When I saw my empty living room this morning it made me feel sad, as though my life here in puddletown was coming to an end. But even endings are temporary, I know. Right after I finish these last three chapters, I am going right back to the first chapter and starting over, with the third draft.

Over at the Nation, Maria Margaronis has an excellent piece of commentary on Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel award:

“Pamuk’s Nobel: Deciphering the Code of Silence in Ankara,” read the headline in the Turkish tabloid Hurriyet–a title that could refer equally to a postmodernist reading of Orhan Pamuk’s work, an account of intrigues among Ottoman pashas or a news story about the Turkish president’s failure to congratulate the laureate. Since the Turkish novelist won the Nobel Prize for Literature, life has strangely come to resemble one of his fictions. On the day the prize was announced the French national assembly passed a bill making it an offense to deny the Armenian genocide, so that a person can now be prosecuted in France for denying something that it is a crime to assert in Turkey.

You can read it all here. In other news, the Literary Saloon reports that Pamuk has cancelled his appearance at the University of Minnesota, where he was due to give the Ohanessian lecture.

The Chronicle reports that the University of Nebraska Press has re-issued Henri Alleg’s The Question, his memoir of torture at the hands of French police during the occupation of Algeria.

French citizens had known vaguely that their colonial authorities were torturing dissidents and suspected terrorists in Algeria, but Mr. Alleg’s essay made that knowledge much more vivid. The French government quickly banned the book’s sale — which, of course, only added to the public frenzy. (The book was legalized in France only after the Algerian war ended, in 1962.)

The Question remains a political touchstone in France, and Mr. Alleg, who is still active in his mid-80s, is a familiar commentator there on the past crimes of French colonialism. But in the English-speaking world, the book has been largely forgotten.

This new edition includes an afterword by Alleg in which he draws comparisons with the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

What do these people have in common? Willie Hulon, head of the FBI’s new national security branch; Rep. Terry Everett (R-Alabama), vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence; and Rep. Jo Ann Davis (R-Virginia), who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.’s performance in recruiting Muslim spies. None of them could tell Jeff Stein the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. And we’re now three years into the war in Iraq.

From yesterday morning’s Guardian:

Lecturers and university staff across Britain are to be asked to spy on “Asian-looking” and Muslim students they suspect of involvement in Islamic extremism and supporting terrorist violence, the Guardian has learned.

They will be told to inform on students to special branch because the government believes campuses have become “fertile recruiting grounds” for extremists.

But if lecturers are spying on students, who’s spying on lecturers?

There’s obviously lots and lots of coverage of Orhan Pamuk now that he has won the Nobel Prize for literature. You can read Robert McCrum’s anecdote of meeting the then “unknown Turkish novelist” in 1991. Or the interview with Malcolm Jones in Newsweek, where Pamuk describes his development as a writer. Or his reaction to the new French law that makes it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide.