Laila Lalami

“By a miracle of publishing, Gilbert Sorrentino’s 1971 novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (a deeply cynical look at the Manhattan art world of mid-century) is available, barely, and it hasn’t lost a bit of its nasty comic brilliance. Begin, for instance, with the beginning: “What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the top of her stockings? It is an old story.” Sorrentino, who died not long ago, was always defiant, hugely incorrect, and unfailingly original; his Mulligan Stew remains a mildly insane and exhilarating satire about publishing (and literature itself), and his more recent Little Casino is a “deck” of fifty-two little linked stories, most of them terrific. But nothing was quite like Imaginative Qualities, which reads, still, as if it might have been written today or, perhaps, tomorrow.”

Jeffrey Frank is the author of four novels, most recently Trudy Hopedale, and co-author, with his wife Diana, of The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation From the Danish. He lives in New York, where he is a senior editor at The New Yorker.

Take a look at Meena; it’s a new literary magazine, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Alexandria, Egypt.

Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.

The short film below, written by Naomi Klein and directed by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón, uses this principle, put forth by economist Milton Friedman, to re-examine some of the fundamental events of our time, including 9/11 and the war on Iraq. It’s called “The Shock Doctrine,” and it’s meant to accompany Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Take a look:

The Guardian has been running excerpts of Klein’s book all week (see one, two, three). I liked what she wrote about the days leading to the invasion of Iraq, but I think at times Klein’s writing in this excerpt is not precise enough or rigorous enough to fully back up her claims. Still, I’m intrigued.

(YouTube video via Amitava Kumar)

The Guardian reports that the contents of Che Guevara’s private notebook will be published next month in Mexico. Instead of the political writing or guerrilla strategy one might expect, the notebook contained Che’s favorite poetry, written in his hand.

Over at Salon, Gary Kamiya commemorates the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by asking what happened: How did we go from nineteen terrorists, most of whom from Saudi Arabia, to the hellish mess that is the Iraq war? Here’s the opening paragraph:

Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his “war on terror.” He has incessantly linked the words “al-Qaida” and “Iraq,” a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It’s no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus’ “anxiously awaited” evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September. The not-so-subliminal message: We must do what Bush and Petraeus say or risk another 9/11.

Petraeus’ evaluation can only be “anxiously awaited” by people who are still anxiously waiting for Godot. We know what will happen next because we’ve been watching this movie for eight months. Gen. Petraeus, Bush’s mighty-me, will insist that we’re making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that “we’re kicking ass” in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April. The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.

So let’s forget the absurd debate about “progress” and whether a bullet in the front of the head is better than one in the back, and how much we can trust our new friends from Saddam’s Fedayeen. On the anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask more basic questions — not just about why we can’t bring ourselves to pull out of Iraq, but why we invaded it in the first place.

Read the entire article here. It’s thoughtful, but also passionate. (And it sort of explains why cheerleaders for the war, like Kenneth Pollack, or complicit Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, just cannot bring themselves to say they were wrong.)

I know I must sound like a broken record by now, but posting may be a bit light this week. I need to finish revising the last chapter of my novel before my trip to New York next week, so please bear with me.

The Observer has an interview with novelist/dentist Alaa Al Aswany about his best-selling novel The Yacoubian Building. The piece is called “An author with bite” (har, har). Al Aswany’s new novel, Chicago, will apparently be released by the American University in Cairo Press in 2008, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t have a U.S. publisher yet.

The legislative elections in Morocco came and went, and the much hyped Islamist tsunami never materialized. As I suggested here on Friday, the PJD (Party of Justice and Development) failed to win a majority of seats–which would have been nearly impossible anyway, thanks to recent electoral reforms–or even to come in first place. They ended up in second place with 47 seats. The pre-election hype about a possible PJD win did serve the Makhzen well, however, presenting the monarchy once again as a bulwark against Islamists of all stripes, even moderate ones. Meanwhile, press and civil freedoms continue to be eroded.

What is surprising, however, is that Istiqlal, the conservative party whom many would have written off as a group of has-been politicians from Fes, took the lead, with 52 seats. The USFP, whose leftist credentials have long been forgotten, were big losers, coming in fifth place with 36 seats. The 2002 elections ushered USFP to power, and they had formed a coalition with Istiqlal in order to keep PJD in check. Now comes news that, in the wake of the 2007 elections, Istiqlal plans on creating a coalition with USFP. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

My review of M.G. Vassanji’s new novel The Assassin’s Song appeared in last weekend’s Chicago Tribune. Here’s the opening paragraph:

In February 2002, a group of Hindu demonstrators converged on the town of Ayodhya, India, to demand that a temple be built on the site of the Babri Masjid, a 16th Century mosque that had been destroyed a decade earlier. On their way back from the rally, their train stopped in the city of Godhra, in Gujarat state, where a group of Muslims standing on the platform allegedly heckled them. Part of the train carrying the Hindu demonstrators caught fire, and nearly 60 people were killed.

The deaths — which new evidence suggests may have been caused by a cooking stove inside the train car — led to months-long attacks on the state’s entire Muslim minority. As many as 2,000 people were murdered. Muslim women were raped and burned alive, and their babies were torn from their wombs. Using voter lists, mobs targeted and looted Muslim businesses. By the time the killings stopped, 150,000 Muslims had been displaced.

The sheer viciousness and depressing regularity of communal riots in Gujarat make it an unlikely setting for a novel about a mystical saint who transcends religious identity, yet that is where M.G. Vassanji places the action in his new novel, “The Assassin’s Song.” Alternating chapters tell the stories of Karsan Dargawalla, an Indian college professor who returns home to Gujarat after having spent long years abroad, and Nur Fazal, a 13th Century Sufi Muslim who arrives in Gujarat seeking refuge with the Hindu king, Vishal Dev. Karsan is Nur’s descendant, his successor — and his avatar.

You can read the review in full here.

Moroccans will be going to the polls today, electing their representatives in the lower house of parliament. You may have come across a couple of alarmist pieces in the Western press saying something like “Oh my God, Oh my God, the Islamists are going to win!” (At least it seemed that way to me when I was in Casablanca: a cover story in Le Point every other week on the topic.) But I think there is little chance of that happening, given recent changes in electoral laws and electoral districts. And in any case, the real question ought to be about what elections really mean in a country where there is no system of checks-and-balances and no accountability to the voters.

The elections will put 325 representatives in parliament, and of these 30 are guaranteed to be women (via national lists). In what is billed as a historical event, the Parti du Centre Social has picked a Jewish Moroccan for its national list, Maguy Kakon. But of course, this is not the first time that Moroccans of the Jewish faith have taken part in the legislative process.

By the way, even though I have dual Moroccan and American citizenships, and even though the constitution provides for the voting rights of MREs (or Moroccans Residing Abroad) I am not able to vote in these elections, because no procedures have been put in place for absentee ballots. Voters must be present at their precincts. More than 3 million Moroccans are thus excluded from the democratic experiment.