John Sutherland on Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Enchantress of Florence:
If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.
The full review is up here. The Man Booker will be awarded sometime in October 2008.
What a thrill it was to hear the good news: Junot Díaz has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Last week, the novelist Tayari Jones (The Untelling, Leaving Atlanta) wrote on her blog about the horrific crimes that took place in Dunbar Village last year. The victims, a Haitian immigrant and her twelve year old son, were treated with such depravity that I had a hard time believing that the four accused were between 14 and 18. Jones wrote of her outrage at the NAACP’s demands to release the teens; she asked fellow writers to help raise money for the victims.
The eBay auction is now up: You can bid on a manuscript critiques by George Saunders, Nichelle Tramble, Sarah Schulman, Joy Castro, Martha Southgate, D. Nurkse, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, and me. Some authors are offering book proposal evaluations and even novel critiques. There are also lots of autographed books on offer. Please hop on over to eBay and make a bid.
From the second chapter of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, when Verloc first hears of Vladimir’s plan to get the F.P. society to bomb a scientific institution of his choosing:
And Mr. Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent Mr. Verloc with inward consternation. He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organisation where in the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge. Once Mr. Verloc had opened his mouth for a protest, but the raising of a shapely, large white hand arrested him. Very soon he became too appalled to even try to protest. He listened in a stillness of dread which resembled the immobility of profound attention.
Does it, I wonder, remind you of someone?
I have not seen much attention in the English-language press to the trouble that Rachid Niny, one of Morocco’s most popular columnists, finds himself in at the moment. The facts of the case, as far as I can tell, are that Niny alleged in one of his articles that a prosecutor in Qsar el Kebir attended a gay wedding held in the house of a trafficker (there was no wedding, but a video purporting to show one landed on YouTube and created quite a ruckus.) The town’s four prosecutors took Niny to court in the capital of Rabat and the judge found Niny guilty of slander, fining him 6 million Dirhams (approximately $850,000.)
All right. Time to pick your jaw off the floor.
This the largest fine ever in the history of libel judgments in Morocco. Undoubtedly, Niny ought not to have printed something for which he did not have proof. But let’s face it: newspapers in Morocco indulge in rumors and blind items on a daily basis. This was a blind item, not a direct claim. What makes this affair murkier is that Niny was recently mugged at the train station in Rabat, and robbed of his cell phone and laptop. Coincidence? Of course not. In addition, Judge Alaoui, who presided over this case, is the same judge who found against Boubker Jamai last year, against the magazine Nichane, and several other journalists. The judgment is clearly meant to crush Niny’s newspaper, Al Massae, which has become the largest in Morocco.
(Oh, and don’t even get me started on why these prosecutors think it an insult to be called gay.)
I am baffled as to the thinking here: What is the point of it? Niny will simply leave the country, and go write for a magazine that is bigger and more powerful than Al Massae. I myself don’t like his columns, except the satirical ones, and I think he is be a bit too cavalier with personal freedoms. The irony now is that he will need the help of all those freedom of expression activists he wasn’t always so keen on. I hope they prevail, and that he will be able to continue to write and work in his own country.
I woke up this morning with Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” stuck in my head, and an inexplicable desire to move to London. I wonder what short circuit led to that particular combination.
I don’t keep up with literary prizes, but I always look forward to the announcement of the IMPAC Dublin award, because the nominations come from libraries around the world; any book in any language is eligible so long as there is an English-language translation; and translators are recognized alongside the authors. This year’s shortlist has just been announced, and the finalists are:
The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas (translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean)
The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne
De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage
Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones
Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua (translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Schlesinger)
The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (translated from the French by John Cullen)
The Woman who Waited by Andrei Makine (translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan)
Winterwood by Patrick McCabe
Notice that three Arab writers have made the cut (Rawi Hage, who is Lebanese; Yasmina Khadra who is Algerian; and Sayed Kashua who is Palestinian) but none of them write in Arabic. Hage lives in Canada and writes in English; Khadra lives in France and writes in French; and Kashua is a citizen of Israel and writes in Hebrew. So few Arabic novels are translated into English that when Arab writers are recognized in international awards, they tend to be those who write in other languages.
The judging panel includes Helon Habila, Patricia Duncker, Aamer Hussein, Eibhlín Evans, and Jose Luis de Juan, and the winner(s) will be announced June 12.
I was recently invited to give a talk for the Authors@Google series, and the video from this event is now available on the @Google site and on YouTube. Enjoy:
I just heard that the Dutch publishing house Maarten Muntinga will be releasing a mass market edition of Hope, (or Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens, I should say) this month in Amsterdam. They also did a new cover, entirely different from the hardcover one of last year.
