Month: March 2007
The latest issue of the LRB has a review by Ruth Bernard Yeazell of Hermione Lee’s new biography of Edith Wharton–a book I really want to get my hands on very soon. Here’s a taste:
‘My God, how does one write a Biography?’ In her magnificent study of Virginia Woolf, Lee chose to answer Woolf’s question not so much by writing a sequential narrative from cradle to grave as by offering a series of topical essays, loosely arranged by chronology and artfully composed to highlight the various aspects of her subject’s personal and imaginative history. So Virginia Woolf began with a meditation on ‘Biography’, and later chapters were as likely to address such recurrent themes as ‘Censors’ or ‘Selves’ as more obvious milestones such as ‘Marriage’ or ‘War’. Edith Wharton adopts a roughly similar method: it opens not with Wharton’s birth but with her parents’ unexpectedly witnessing revolution in the Paris of 1848, and its second chapter, ‘Making Up’, is as much a commentary on the evasions of the adult autobiographer as on the young Edith Jones’s love of storytelling. With both novelists, Lee is particularly sensitive to the gap between the life as lived and the writer’s retrospective creation of herself; and unlike many literary biographers, she is at her best when her subject’s own imaginative powers are at their height. Her readings of The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence – not to mention A Backward Glance – help to persuade one that biography is a means of enhancing literature, not reducing it.
The rest of the review is here.
No reader of Arabic literature in translation would fail to recognize the name of translator Denys Johnson-Davies: He has worked on books by Naguib Mahfouz, Zakaria Tamer, and Tewfiq Al-Hakim, to name just a few. And he also translated Tayib Salih’s masterpiece, Season of Migration to the North. So I was more than a little disappointed when I came across these pearls of wisdom in his introduction to the Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction. On the birth of the Arabic novel, he writes:
But many were the prejudices that had to be overcome. The idea of an author creating characters and making them inhabit worlds of his creation not only was foreign to the Arab Muslim mind but was even regarded as almost unacceptable. Take, for example, the ever-entertaining stories of The Thousand and One Nights. This anonymous work, so esteemed throughout the world as a masterpiece of imaginative literature, remains for most Arabs a work unworthy of serious consideration. Arab men of letters have long looked askance at the extravagances of The Arabian Nights, as the book is better known in the West, finding them suitable only for minds incapable of appreciating other forms of literature, and grudgingly admitting that the stories might have some merit only when the outside world lavished praise on them.
On the universal appeal of Arabic novels:
Many Arab writers have no experience of the outside world or of a foreign language, and their reading of world literature is confined to works translated into Arabic. Thus a reader of Mohamed El-Bisatie’s A Last Glass of Tea will find that every one of its twenty-four stories takes place in villages around Lake Manzala in the Nile Delta. But readers in the West have shown themselves capable of relating to cultures that they come across for the first time in fiction, especially when captured by a master’s hand.
On choosing to present the writers in the anthology by alphabetical order:
I prefer to treat the Arab world as the one cultural unit that it is.
But don’t let these absurd comments discourage you from reading the anthology (which is pretty amazing) or anything he’s translated (particularly Season of Migration.)
I forgot to mention last week how much I enjoyed Richard Wolin’s essay in The Nation on the current malaise about Muslim citizens and immigrants in Europe. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Today there are an estimated 15 million to 17 million Muslims living in Europe. Anyone who wishes to address the theme of “Europe and Islam” immediately runs up against an intractable definitional conundrum. For in Europe, the monolithic religion known as Islam is functionally nonexistent. The national origins of the European Muslim population vary dramatically from country to country. To wit: Whereas the majority of Dutch Muslims hail from Indonesia, Suriname, Morocco and Turkey, most British Muslims emigrated from the Indian subcontinent. Germany’s Muslims are predominantly Turks (Turkey is, of course, a secular republic, honoring the separation of mosque and state), whereas the origins of the French Muslim community may be traced to the Maghreb, or Saharan Africa.
The French Muslim community itself is further subdivided among Arabs, Berbers (from the mountainous Kabyle region of Algeria), Africans and converts, who compose 1 percent of French Muslims. How, then, might one classify a nonobservant Kabyle immigrant who is a French citizen, born in Algeria, educated in the French school system, who speaks Amazigh at home and French at work? Is he/she Berber, Algerian, French or, qua nonobservant, even veritably Muslim? Clearly, the vagaries of religion, identity and ethnicity are multifarious, rich and potentially dizzying.
You can read it all here.
I was walking back home through a small street where kids from a nearby high school often gather to smoke, hang out, or chat each other up. It was six o’clock, and it was already getting dark. I was thinking about my novel and not paying too much attention, when I saw two cops drive their motorcycles, tires screeching, right up in front of a teenager standing by an electricity pole. He was tall and lanky, wore jeans and a jacket, and seemed entirely harmless. One of the cops got off his bike, and told the teenager to turn out his pockets. The boy refused; the cop slapped him.
Almost instantaneously, a handful of the teenager’s friends moved away to the other side of the street. I heard someone yell out loud–from a safe distance: “So this is democracy?”
When the pat-down didn’t reveal anything, the policemen told the teenager he could go. Just as he started walking away, they made him turn around and walk in the opposite direction–for the hell of it. And then they sat on their motorcycles and watched.