Laila Lalami

It seems there is some sort of brouhaha over reviews of Martin Amis’s new book, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom, a collection of essays about terrorism, jihadism, and other -isms. One of the earliest write-ups here in the United States was by Michiko Kakutani, who hated it:

Indeed “The Second Plane” is such a weak, risible and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator.

A few weeks later, Jim Sleeper rose in defense of Amis:

It would be too easy to read Martin Amis’ slim book on Sept. 11 in a day and to dismiss it with a politically correct glare. The dozen essays, columns and reviews and two short stories in “The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom” are more illuminating than that, though deeply, sometimes self-indulgently flawed.

This weekend, Leon Wieseltier rendered this judgment:

I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful. But the vacant intensity that has characterized so much of Amis’s work flourishes here too.

Now Jim Sleeper has another retort/defense. You can find out more about the literary quarrel from Ron Hogan at Galleycat.

I find these disagreements quite healthy, but also very amusing, as it seems no one thinks it necessary or useful to ask a reviewer of the Muslim persuasion to take a look at the The Second Plane, a book that is, after all, largely concerned with Muslims: their religion, their beliefs, their politics, their life in Britain, and the violent encounters of the jihadist among them with the West. When Amis says:

There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

and then proceeds to write a whole book in which he expands on these ideas, shouldn’t the reading public have a chance to find out what one of the people he seems so concerned about make of his work?

Last Saturday, a fire blazed through a mattress factory in Casablanca, killing 55 people and injuring dozens of others. The exit doors had been locked by the owner, who stated he did so in order to prevent theft of materials. He is now under arrest. Today comes news that another fire broke out in a different part of the city, in a carpet factory, killing 3 people. Inna lillah, wa inna ilayhi raji’oun.

Everyone knows that the law is regularly and spectacularly flouted in industrial outfits in the city. It remains to be seen whether measures will be taken or whether bribes will change hands. I’d say the latter, wouldn’t you?

Thanks to those of you who came out to Korn Convocation Hall on the UCLA campus on Saturday. The place was packed, my panelists were great, and I had a wonderful time, even though I managed to get several sunburns. You can find full coverage of the fest at Jacket Copy, Counterbalance, and Book Fox. And of course don’t miss Tod Goldberg‘s take on the weekend.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books takes place this weekend on the UCLA campus. On the schedule are panel discussions, readings, and even writing seminars. I will be hosting a panel on Saturday:

April 26, 2008
2:30 PM
Fiction: Not So Ordinary People
Tony Earley, Dinaw Mengestu, Stewart O’Nan, Ann Packer and moderated by Laila Lalami
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Korn Convocation Hall
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, California

Come on by and say hello.

A couple of days ago, the amazing Pico Iyer gave an appreciation on NPR of one of my favorite novels of all time: Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. And then today he’s sharing his music playlist with Dwight Garner over at Papercuts. Iyer’s most recent book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He’ll be talking about it at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend. You don’t want to miss him.

As I’m sure you’ve realized by now, I’m spending much of this week chatting up some of my friends’ books. Today, I was hoping you would take a look at Apologies Forthcoming, Xujun Eberlein‘s debut collection of short stories. Eberlein is an M.I.T-trained engineer who started writing in Chinese, but switched to English after moving to the United States in 1988. Her stories and personal essays have been published in Agni, StoryQuarterly, and Kwani, among other magazines. They often feature characters struggling with the effect of China’s cultural revolution. Her collection of stories, which won the Tartt Fiction Prize last year, is due out in May.

Yesterday, I mentioned Mark Sarvas‘s debut novel, so today I’d like to give a shout-out to my friend Mary Akers, a novelist and short story writer from New York. She just published her first book, Radical Gratitude, a memoir co-written with Andrew Bienkowski, about his experiences in Siberia, where he and his family were exiled during Stalin’s rule. The book has done very well in Australia (it’s already on a second printing there) and is due out in the UK, Germany, and elsewhere very soon. You can read some of Akers’s work in the Bellevue Literary Review, the Wisconsin Review, and Brevity.

My friend Mark Sarvas has just published his first novel, Harry, Revised. It’s about a recently widowed man who finds love at the most unexpected of times, and has to reinvent himself in order to win the woman for whom he’s fallen. I read it when it was still in draft form, and I really liked how it dealt with the subject of grief without being stern or preachy. I admired the fact that it’s a very sympathetic and complex look at a pretty pathetic man. And, of course, it’s full of humor. Now that Harry, Revised is finally out in bookstores, I’m looking forward to reading the final version.

Sarvas will be going on book tour at the end of the month, so check out his website for dates.

On Saturday I had an op-ed in The Boston Globe about the politics of fear in the current presidential election. Here’s how it opens:

A FEW weeks ago, I received an e-mail with the subject line: “Excited about Barack Obama? Read this.”

The e-mail contained a copy of a Jan. 22 Senate memo, signed by the presidential candidate, in which he asked the American ambassador to the United Nations to “ensure that the Security Council issue no statement and pass no resolution” about the situation in Gaza unless it included a full condemnation of Hamas.

At the time the memo was sent, Gaza had been closed by Israeli forces for several days, its only power plant had ceased operating, and its 1.5 million Palestinian inhabitants had little or no access to food. The e-mail was sent to hundreds of Arab- and Muslim-Americans, and it ended with a bold, highlighted line: “Think again before you cast your vote for another AIPAC puppet,” referring to the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

I just heard news that the Martinican man of letters Aimé Césaire, who authored the classic Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, who inspired such different people as Frantz Fanon and Leopold Sedar Senghor, and who created the undeniably influential but now occasionally derided concept of négritude, has passed away in Fort-de-France. He was 94.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy is due to attend the funeral on Sunday. I wonder if his speech will bear any similarities to the the one he gave in Dakar last summer.