Laila Lalami

Daniel Alarcón, whose novel Lost City Radio comes out next month, is interviewed by Daniel Olivas over at TEV.

DANIEL OLIVAS: Why did you decide to set your novel in an unnamed South American country? Why not place it specifically in Peru?

DANIEL ALARCÓN: In writing this novel, I didn’t want to feel restricted in any way by the history, geography, or social landscape of Peru. It wasn’t my intention to be coy: I’m Peruvian, the general arc of the war as it unfolds in the novel is similar to that of the Peruvian conflict, and everyone will be able to recognize this. Still, the more I’ve traveled, the more places I’ve seen and people I’ve talked to, the more it has become clear to me that the forces shaping the future of a city like Lima are at work in developing countries all over the planet. When I was on tour last, for War by Candlelight, I always found myself saying, “If Peru was an invented country, and Lima an invented city, many people would still recognize it,” and I guess I sort of followed my own advice.

You can read the rest of this, and other answers, here.

Brian Sholis has started a cool little blog where he shares writers’ correspondence: Today in Letters. Samples: A letter from Paul Bowles to his editor Daniel Halpern, or one from Henry James to William Dean Howells.

Yesterday’s Morning Edition on NPR included a segment by Emily Harris about the challenges faced by gay Muslims in Europe. It was interesting to learn, for example, that gay Muslim organizations used to deal primarily with homophobia from their own community, but in the last few years they have been dealing more with Islamophobia from Europeans. The segment also includes an interview with Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa.

Thanks to Anne for the link.

The hard-working Chris Abani has a new novel out, The Virgin of Flames, which is about a biracial mural artist looking for himself in Los Angeles. Writing in the L.A. Times, Rubén Martinez finds that

All of this makes for a strange tension, a dissonance between simplistic dichotomies and the ambiguous renderings that Abani wants to paint for us in much the same way that Black paints his post-colonial, post-Sept. 11 Madonna. At times, Black comes across as the New Angeleno Man, a being of diffuse identity imbued not with superficial multiculturalism but with a more human wistfulness. “With an Igbo father and Salvadoran mother,” Abani writes, “Black never felt he was much of either. It was a curious feeling, like being a bird, he thought, swaying on a wire somewhere, breaking for the sky when night and rain came, except for him it never felt like flight, more like falling; falling and drowning in cold, cold water. When he felt the water rise, he would morph.” (…) Ultimately, “The Virgin of Flames” cannot fulfill the massive task of representing the transformation of Los Angeles into the astonishing and troubled amalgam of peoples it has become. Nor is this necessarily Abani’s goal; he is, after all, concerned as much with Black’s psychic landscape as with the social geography of L.A. How the novel is read, I suspect, will have much to do with readers’ places in the city, their relationships with whoever their “others” happen to be.

Meanwhile, Karen Olsson, who reviews the book for the New York Times, says:

Just as Black combines racist jokes and lines from Wallace Stevens in a work entitled “American Gothic — The Remix,” so Abani imagines a place that is horrifying and tender and absurd in equal measure. But with its uneven tone and meandering story, the book doesn’t quite hold together. The language veers from portentous to reportorial, and sometimes falls flat, as in a dull first-date scene between Black and Sweet Girl. As a result the final conflagration carries less impact than it might have.

Still, these are the missteps of an ambitious writer with an original perspective. In “The Virgin of Flames” he audaciously stakes his claim on a city not his own. And wisely, he doesn’t so much try to reveal its hidden side as to give it a costume, or a paint job, of his own making.

I have to say I am very intrigued as to what Abani will make of Los Angeles, and I want to read his book.

Readers of this blog are probably aware of my utter disagreement with the U.S. government’s foreign policy. I think the country is being run by an imbecile, and that the war he started in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. So imagine my surprise at finding myself in the unusual position of having to defend the United States. When Alex and I were in Europe a few days ago, we both noticed really strong anti-U.S. sentiment, much stronger in Paris than here in Casablanca–and that is saying something. People are very angry about the war in Iraq (who can blame them?) but they also seem to think that all Americans approve of it and have bought Bush’s lies. I hope the pictures of the anti-war protest this past weekend in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in the nation, make it on world media.

Photo credits: Jim Bourg/Reuters; Joshua Roberts/Reuters.

The latest issue of Tingis, the Moroccan American magazine of culture and ideas, includes a long review by Anouar Majid of my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.

Journalist Issandr El Amrani has an opinion piece on Tompaine.com about how the U.S. is actively building the new SADDAM:

Having made a mess of Iraq, continuing to refuse to play a constructive and even-handed role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and having gotten bored with democracy promotion, the Bush administration now appears to be fanning the flames of sectarian strife region-wide. Since September 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials have made trips to the Middle East to rally the support of what Rice has described as the “moderate mainstream” Arab states against Iran. This group has now been formalized as the “GCC + 2,” meaning the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman) as well as Egypt and Jordan.

I suggest that this new coalition be renamed to something less technocratic: the Sunni Arab-Dominated Dictatorships Against the Mullahs, or SADDAM. I have to confess I was inspired by historical precedent.

Read more here.

I took the train to Fes yesterday to give a reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits at the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre at Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University. The students had all read the book and some of my articles beforehand, so we had a very lively and thorough discussion after the reading. I was so impressed with their talent and intelligence–they asked good questions, tough questions, and I was thrilled to have such an engaged group of readers. My only regret is that it was such a short trip (I had to get back to Casablanca, and back to my desk) and I saw nothing of the city. I think the last time I was in Fes was when I was nine or ten, and I really want to go back and do a proper visit.

Valerie Trueblood–who contributed a guest recommendation here a little while ago–is interviewed over at the LBC about her novel, Seven Loves.

I like the cover of this week’s Nation. It states simply:

World opinion is against the U.S. escalation in Iraq. The American people are against it. Congress is against it. The Iraqi people are against it. The Iraqi government is against it. Can a single man force a nation to fight a war it does not want to fight, expand a war it does not want to expand? If he can, is that nation any longer a democracy in any meaningful sense? If not, how can democratic rule and the republican form of government be restored?

And the full editorial is here.