I have been following my good friend Mark Sarvas‘s progress as he wrote his novel, revised it, polished it, found an agent, and went into the submission process. And I am thrilled to share with you the happy news that he has just sold his novel, Harry, Revised to Bloomsbury. Having read the book a couple of months ago, I can tell you you’re in for a treat. Congratulations are in order!
With all the commotion of the last few weeks, I completely failed to notice that Sherman Alexie had a new novel coming out. It’s his first in ten years, it’s called Flight, and it sounds trippy. Here’s the publisher’s description:
[A] powerful, fast and timely story of a troubled foster teenager — a boy who is not a “legal” Indian because he was never claimed by his father — who learns the true meaning of terror. About to commit a devastating act, the young man finds himself shot back through time on a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He resurfaces in the form of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, inhabits the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Big Horn, and then rides with an Indian tracker in the 19th Century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. When finally, blessedly, our young warrior comes to rest again in his own contemporary body, he is mightily transformed by all he’s seen.
The book comes out March 28, and you can already see the PW review here.
At the time I was writing Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, that is, between the spring of 2002 and the winter of 2004, I had not visited Tangier in more than fifteen years. I had spent several summers in the city as a child and teenager, and, perhaps presumptuously, I felt I still knew the place well enough to be able to describe it in a decent way. I wrote about streets and buildings and cafés, but I was working essentially from memory.
While in Tangier this past weekend, I decided to visit some of the places I wrote about in the book. I walked through the Gran Socco and the Socco Chico, and it was interesting to see how much they had changed (many of the historic buildings have been renovated), and also how little (there are still plenty of tourist guides, kif smokers, and vendors in sombreros.) The talk of the town was the city’s candidacy to host the 2012 World’s Fair. The train station has been moved to a new location, and the port now includes a free trade zone. Tangier felt like a city in motion, just as I remembered it.
In “Better Luck Tomorrow,” my character Murad spends time in a Café la Liberté, which was a fictional place, but as I was walking down one of the streets that led to the socco, I discovered there really was a Café La Liberté. I sat down for a cup of coffee there, and there really was a football match playing on the screen, and deals being made at the tables. 
In the story, Murad meets some tourists who are curious to find the famous Café Central, so of course I went there as well. It has been nicely renovated, and the outside tables were packed. I took a photo of the Pension Fuentes that sits across the lane. I walked into one of the antique shops where the action in “The Storyteller” takes place. I felt like I had stepped, once again since writing it, into my own book.
Barrada chose to inaugurate the new Cinéma Rif with the work of a Moroccan filmmaker, the lovely and amazing Farida Benlyazid, whose latest film, Juanita de Tanger, has been making the festival rounds. (The picture is based on the novel by Angel Vasquez, La Vida Perra de Juanita Narboni.) Benlyazid was quite emotional when she took the stage: She remembered coming to the then-dilapidated theater to watch Abdel Halim films back in the sixties, and she spoke of what this new theater will mean for her hometown. In the audience was another original patron of the place–Tahar Ben Jelloun. It was a Tangerine evening.
I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, picking up different essays at different moments, depending on my mood. This morning, I finally read the opening piece, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Didion writes about the death of a dentist named Gordon Miller, a Seventh-Day Adventist from San Bernardino County, California, and the subsequent trial of his wife, Lucille Maxwell, for his murder. Didion begins the piece not with an examination of the tabloid trial, but with a reflection about dreams–of love, of wealth, of happily ever after–in a part of California where “it was easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book.” And then she writes, “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
Why do I have the feeling that her words could just as easily apply to Morocco? It’s interesting to me that foreign journalists, those who visit the place on assignment, love to play up the fact that this is an “ancient” country, with its millennial history, its customs, and its religions. And yet it’s hard to escape the future here. This is, after all, a place where historical sites are discarded in favor of shiny new developments, where everyone keeps talking about that new government plan or that five- or ten-year initiative, the strategies that will finally end poverty, eradicate illiteracy, and bring democracy and financial prosperity. It’s all in the future. How many remember that those things were said thirty years ago?
Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan’s new book, In the Footsteps of the Prophet, came out in the United States a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t seen any reviews yet, but Ian Buruma profiled him for the New York Times Sunday magazine, and now Steve Paulson of WPR has an interview with him in Salon. I find Tariq Ramadan somewhat interesting, but not very convincing–his discourse is far too focused on religion (understandable, given his background) and he hardly ever mentions economic or social factors when he discusses the geographical region that falls loosely under the tag of ‘Islam.’ In some way, I think he contributes to an essentialist view of the region, to the same extent that Ayaan Hirsi Ali does, even though her views are diametrically opposed to his. Still, I will be very curious to check out his new book.
I just finished reading Tahmima Anam’s first book, A Golden Age, a historical novel set during the Bangladeshi war of independence. It follows a young widow named Rehana, as she tries to keep her small family–her son Sohail, and her daughter Maya–together through the horror of the 1971 war with Pakistan. A Golden Age has one of the best opening chapters I’ve read in a while, and so it was good to see it included in the latest issue of Granta magazine (Granta 96: War Zones).
I was very upset to have missed Mahmoud Darwish‘s appearance in Morocco last week. (In my defense, I should say that the organizers had originally listed him as reading in Casablanca, and then moved him to Rabat at the last minute and I couldn’t make arrangements to go.) I feel horrible to have missed him. Who knows when an opportunity to hear him might come again?
By the way, Copper Canyon Press is publishing a translation by Fady Joudah of three recent works by Darwish, under the title The Butterfly’s Burden. And here’s the best part: The volume is bilingual, so you can feast on the Arabic as well as the English. Get your copy. Now.
I have avoided linking to any articles about the recent allegations about Iran since these claims seem so clearly to be a repetition of what we saw in late 2002 and early 2003, and I find the whole thing too depressing. But I want to point to an analysis at fair.org of just how some newspapers are making the same mistakes as with pre-Iraq war intelligence:
In the report, “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says,” [New York Times] reporter Michael R. Gordon cited a one-sided array of anonymous sources charging the Iranian government with providing a particularly deadly variety of roadside bomb to Shia militias in Iraq: “The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.” (…) Repeatedly citing the likes of “administration officials,” “American intelligence” and “Western officials,” the article used unnamed sources four times as often as named ones. Only one source in Gordon’s report challenged the official claims: Iranian United Nations ambassador Javad Zarif, who was allowed a one-sentence denial of Iranian government involvement.
And in a thoughtful, clear-sighted op-ed in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, Adam Shatz makes several points that deserve to be highlighted.
If Iran wants to see a friendly government established in Iraq, it hardly lacks for reasons. Unlike the United States, Iran was attacked by Iraq, back when Hussein’s regime enjoyed American support as a bulwark against Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians died during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). When Iraq used poison gas against Iranian troops, the United States uttered not a single protest.Not surprisingly, Iran wants to ensure that no government in Iraq will threaten it again. That’s why Iran made no secret of its joy over Hussein’s downfall, but it also refuses to accept a potentially hostile American base in the Persian Gulf or to cede absolute control over Iraq’s future to the United States.
We had a great turnout at Dar America on Thursday. I find the experience of meeting my readers very pleasurable, but I have to say it feels even more special to be able to read from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits here in Casablanca. The questions revolved around the theme of immigration: “Why did you choose this? Is it because it’s in fashion?” I had to smile at this, and explain that devoting three years of my life to something that may be ‘à la mode’ would not be the best use of my time. I didn’t set out to write about immigration; I set out to write about one young man’s desire to prove to his family that he could be a success if only the right opportunity came along. And the story of Murad turned into something bigger and more complex, until I ended up with this book. The other questions were about individual stories, the process of writing Hope, the title of the book, what I am working on now, and so on. I had a wonderful, wonderful time.
