Laila Lalami

I enjoyed Aziz Huq’s review in the American Prospect of Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam and Zachary Shore’s Breeding Bin Ladens. Huq has produced a very level-headed piece on a topic that far too often degenerates into polemics.

Those of you who subscribe to the New Republic: Could you email me James Wood’s review of Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation? Done. Thanks.

Last week, a friend of mine emailed me to ask whether I missed anything about America. I wanted to write back and say that America is everywhere. There are cafés called “Madison Square,” neighborhoods called “Californie,” rappers called “Bigg,” a few reality TV shows, and several McDonald’s and Pizza Huts. But I’ll tell you what I miss: Our house’s fireplaces and central heating. It’s been windy and cold in Casablanca the last few days, and our apartment, like most dwellings here, doesn’t have central heating. In order to get any work done, I have to wrap myself up in fleece blankets, put on the kind of thick socks I usually wear for hiking, and hug my laptop. Time to go buy a heater.

“Lynne Tillman’s Motion Sickness helped change my conception of what a novel could be,” Marshall writes. “Published in 1992, it’s an account of an unnamed female narrator’s post modern “grand tour” of Europe. She bounces - or ricochets - between Paris, Istanbul, Amsterdam and other destinations. Her background, as well as the specific motivation for her travels, remain mysterious, although some sort of loss seems implied. In each city she knows or meets people. As the novel progresses, an increasingly dense web of interrelationships emerges. All the while she reads, she thinks, has doubts, and writes postcards (which she may or may not send).

Formally, the novel Motion Sickness most resembles is, to my mind, Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, first published in 1995. In both, a somewhat arbitrary physical tour provides the occasion for a mental journey. But while Sebald’s work has begun to travel into the canon, Motion Sickness has gone out of print. Why? Several possible explanations occur. Certainly, although Tillman’s vision can at moments be grim, her darkness never approaches the Sebaldian. She is too often too riotously funny. I’ve sometimes wondered whether it is precisely this sense of humor, along with her rigorous refusal of any hint of pretentiousness, that has kept her work from being regarded with the same seriousness as that of her German contemporary. Or is it simply (and depressingly) because women writers still aren’t supposed to write major novels of ideas? Or did Motion Sickness just appear before its time?

Unanswerable questions. The world - and Tillman’s work - abounds in them (in this sense, although I suspect she would beg to differ, I think Tillman is a great realist). But thanks to the wonders of the internet, although Motion Sickness may be out of print, it isn’t unavailable. Buy it. Read it. Help it on its journey. Pass it along.”

Robert Marshall’s debut novel, A Separate Reality, is newly published by Carroll & Graf.

Ihsan Taylor reviews Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits for the New York Times Book Review’s Paperback Row.

If, like me, you’re a fan of Marjane Satrapi’s work, then you might like to know that she has a blog, in which she discusses her work on the film adaptation of Persepolis.

Day 1
Because I depend on the Internet for much of my work (contact with my editor, my agent, etc.), one of my primary concerns when I arrived in Casablanca was to get a DSL connection, and get it fast. So I went to a Maroc Telecom office on my first day in town, exhausted and jetlagged. I was helped by M., a prematurely balding, slightly overweight man, who was a little grumpy at first, but loosened up after I made a couple of jokes. I asked about getting a phone line set up and a DSL connection working, and was told it would take 48 hours for the former and up to 15 days for the latter. But, M. assured me, in most cases, customers are connected within a day or two.
“Fine,” I said. “I’d like to sign up today.”
M. picked up several forms, a couple of which were in triplicate, and lined them up neatly on the desk between us. “First, we need to prepare your contract.”
“Contract? What contract?”
“For receiving your service. It’s for two years.”
“A-sidi, I’m only here for nine months, to do research. Can’t you just bill me month to month?”
“No, that’s not possible. But you can sign up for one year if you like.”
Of course, it was significantly more expensive to sign up for the one-year contract than the two-year contract, not to mention buying a telephone and a modem. But even the one-year contract posed problems for me. “What do I do after my stay is over? I’m going to be vacating my apartment and can’t bloody well leave the phone and Internet behind for the next person.”
“I’ll tell you what you can do. You can file a change of address form and put down the address of a family member, and then they can have the Internet. When the remaining 3 months are completed, the contract is over.”
“And how do I transfer service to another address?”
M. proceeded to give me an explanation that made my head spin: I could already see that I would have to fill out more forms, in triplicate, and wait in line for hours, at God knew what other agency in town. I looked at the numbers again. I must have looked quite stricken at the choices before me, because M. began to chuckle lightly. “I have a feeling that I am swindling you,” he said.
Ah, finally, something on which we could both agree. “I have the feeling that I am being swindled.”
He laughed again. I did not. I was so desperate that I decided not to worry about what would happen at the end of my nine months here. I just wanted to deal with the problem at hand, so I gave him the money. Instead of giving me my 10 dirhams in change, he suddenly turned to me and asked, “Do you know about the annual campaign for solidarity? We’re selling these yellow badges for them. It’s a very good cause–the fight against poverty.”
I couldn’t say no to that. “How much is it?”
“Only 10 dirhams.”
“Fine,” I said. I took the badge from him. And then I noticed that he did not set 10 dirhams aside for the charitable donation I had just been forced to make. My contribution may well have gone to his personal fund. After we finished all the paperwork, M. finally went to the stock room to get me my DSL modem. I noticed that the box didn’t say whether the modem had an ethernet port, so I asked him if it had one. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it has everything you need to connect.” I thanked him and left.

(more…)

Driss C. Jaydane will present his debut novel, Le Jour venu, at the Carrefour des Livres here in Casablanca. Set in the 1980s, Le Jour venu is described as the coming of age story of a young bourgeois from Casablanca. Having the reading in a Maarif bookstore is quite à propos, then.

Write-ups in the local press have been quite favorable. See, for instance, the article by Driss Ksikes in Tel Quel or the review by Kenza Sefrioui in Le Journal. Details:

Driss C. Jaydane
Le Jour venu
Thursday, December 7
7 pm
Carrefour des Livres
Angle des Landes et rue Vignemale
Casablanca
022 23 46 65

Be there!

This pleases me enormously: Yiyun Li’s short story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers has won the Guardian First Book Award. This is a general award, not strictly reserved for short stories, or even for fiction, so it’s particularly sweet to see Yiyun’s book taking the top spot.

The Marrakech International Film Festival takes place this week, and needless to say there is much coverage of the events by star-struck journalists on radio, television, and in print, here in Casablanca. The jury this year is composed of the irrepressible Jamel Debbouze, actors Sandrine Bonnaire and Paz Vega, and directors Yousry Nasrallah and Pan Nalin, among others. The president is Roman Polanski. The festival opened with a tribute to national treasure Mohammed Majd (The Messenger, Ali Zaoua, Syriana, Le Grand Voyage, etc.). He received a standing ovation, and appeared emotional as he gave the customary acceptance speech. Majd is, with Amina Rachid and Amidou, one of only three Moroccans to have been so honored since the festival started in 2001. (The other honorees include Omar Sharif, Claude Lelouch, John Boorman, David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Claudia Cardinale, Sean Connery, Youssef Chahine, Abbas Kiarostami, and a whole bunch of others.) In any case, the interesting bit is that Mohammed Majd was quoted in the 22 November issue of the newspaper Assahifa as saying, “It would be a mess if the organizers of the Marrakech film festival were Moroccans.” The quote was reprinted by a couple of magazines, but without anyone really disagreeing or taking offense. Although the festival staff is largely Moroccan, the director and several of the top organizers are French–part of the continuing attitude in this country to leave the direction of larger projects to foreigners. Pretty sad.