I will be taking part in a reading tonight at the Los Angeles Public Library to honor the victims of the bombing of Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad last year. I will be reading two brief poems (one by Mutanabbi himself, one by Darwish) in the original Arabic, followed by English translations. My wonderful UCR colleague Chris Abani will read, as will Beau Beausoleil, Suzanne Lummis, Marisela Norte, Sholeh Wolpe, and Terry Wolverton. Please come.
The new issue of Bookforum is now available, and it includes a review by Siddhartha Deb of J.M. Coetzee’s new novel Diary of a Bad Year. In the U.K., where the book first appeared, the reviews have been mixed, but this early piece here in the U.S. is just lovely. Here is its concluding paragraph:
The books have all been short, the language deceptively simple, but Coetzee’s recurrent themes have been no less than the vital signs of a culture, one possibly in its death throes. Diary of a Bad Year may be his most successful diagnosis yet of what we are suffering from, one that even offers hope in the form of resistance, critical thought, and the odd, imperfect humanity that emerges in the story of Anya and Señor C. In other writers, such hope would appear trite, but we know that Coetzee is no sentimentalist. His humanism has always been hard-won, wrested from those early lessons in authoritarianism and opposition, and this brilliant novel shows how much better prepared Coetzee is than many Western writers to come to terms with our new age.
When I was in Europe earlier this fall I was frustrated to see that the Italian translation of the novel was already published while we here in the U.S. had to wait until January. Another six weeks to go!
I finished work early yesterday and went to the Laemmle in Santa Monica to catch a matinee of the Coen brothers’ new film, No Country For Old Men, their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel by the same title. The story is about a welder named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on a handful of dead men in the Rio Grande, along with a bag full of cash–about 2 million dollars. He takes the cash, setting off a chain of events, which, although easily guessed at, are nevertheless completely suspenseful. On Moss’s trail are a psychopathic killer (Javier Bardem), a sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), an assassin (Woody Harrelson), and a handful of unnamed Mexican drug dealers. (Unnamed, and undeveloped as characters, something that is true also of two of the three females in the book.)
In some ways, the Coen brothers’ adaptation remedied a couple of the problems in McCarthy’s otherwise excellent novel. One is that a crucial scene that resolves what happens to Moss is missing from the book, but not from the film. The other is that, in the book, it’s easy to miss the fact that the story is set in 1980 (the date is hinted at the beginning, but not mentioned again until about halfway through the novel.) Obviously, in the movie, the sense of time was immediately clear. The film also gives us the pleasure of hearing McCarthy’s pitch-perfect dialogue spoken by talented actors. (You know how, after watching Fargo, you left the theater and tried to speak like Frances McDormand? You’ll be doing the same with Tommy Lee Jones in No Country.) But there are also ways in which the Coen brothers’ movie doesn’t quite compare with the novel. The one female character, for instance, that did something other than plead with a man or serve him food or coffee ended up being cut entirely from the film. Still, the level of craft that went into making this adaptation is really, really remarkable. Not to be missed.
I’ll be giving a reading tomorrow at Cal Poly Pomona. Here are details:
12:00 PM
Lecture and Reading
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
3801 West Temple Avenue
Pomona, California
If you live in the area, come on by. The event is free and open to the public.