Laila Lalami

I don’t get all the hoopla over Scott McClellan’s What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. If he knew that his boss’s arguments were war propaganda, then why didn’t he step down? And if he didn’t know, then why suddenly come out with it now, when criticizing George Bush has become the safest national pastime? Oh, right: Ka-ching!

I have been looking forward to the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road ever since I heard that Viggo Mortensen would play the role of the father. Yesterday the New York Times‘ Charles McGrath had a report from the set on the challenges of filming the post-apocalyptic world that McCarthy imagined.

I’ve been asked to do a signing at BEA, for an anthology to which I contributed a story. Here are the details:

May 31, 2008
2:00 PM
A Stranger Among Us signing
With Stacy Bierlein, Aimee Luu, and Laila Lalami
University of Illinois Press Booth
Book Expo America
LA Convention Center
Los Angeles, California

If you are in Los Angeles this weekend, please stop by to say hello.

Priceless! A 1971 Moroccan commercial that uses the classic tale of Qais wa Laila to hawk Palmolive shampoo:

(Link.)

Every time I read through Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North I notice how the book remains as relevant today as it was when it was first published.

Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen continued to draw a distinctive picture of the mind of a genius whom circumstances had driven to killing in a moment of bad passion. He related to them how I had been appointed a lecturer in economics at London University at the age of twenty-four. He told them that Ann Hammond and Sheila Greenwood were girls who were seeking death by every means and that they would have committed suicide whether they had met Mustafa Sa’eed or not. “Mustafa Sa’eed, gentlemen of the jury, is a noble person whose mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago.” It occurred to me that I should stand up and say to them: “This is untrue, a fabrication. It was I who killed them. I am the desert of thirst. I am no Othello. I am a lie. Why don’t you sentence me to be hanged and so kill the lie?” But Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen turned the trial into a conflict between two worlds, a struggle of which I was one of the victims.

This, of course, from the scene in which Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen pleads with the jury to spare Mustafa Sa’eed’s life.

Ahdaf Soueif and Ian Jack have written brief essays for the Guardian about their participation in the Palestine Literary Festival, which took them, along with Esther Freud, Claire Messud, Pankaj Mishra, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Roddy Doyle and others, to the cities of Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Bethlehem.

All day I’ve been haunted by this photo of a South African mob, with, in the foreground, that smiling man with the hammer in one hand and a stick in the other.

The usual violence against immigrants in South Africa has taken on such shocking measures in the last few days that it’s frankly a relief to hear that troops have been called–I just hope they actually help.

Photo: Jerome Delay/AP

I was interviewed by Gabriela Jauregui for KCET’s ArtsBlock. For the curious, here’s the podcast.

You’ve heard a lot about Jeremiah Wright, but have you heard about McCain’s “spiritual adviser,” one Rod Parsley?

Don’t worry, most of the mainstream media haven’t heard either.

I really enjoyed David Shaftel’s essay on how V.S. Naipaul is read and interpreted in his native Trinidad. The piece appeared last Sunday in the New York Times Book Review, but, between my novel and my teaching, it’s taking me several days to catch up on reading. Here is the opening paragraph:

If the measure of a writer’s success is the ire he provokes, then V. S. Naipaul is a spectacular success in Trinidad. In this island nation of just over a million people, there is a widespread perception that he has jilted his homeland through unflattering portraits in his books and a string of cutting remarks over the years. “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies,” Naipaul wrote in “The Middle Passage” (1962) — the first sign that he wasn’t going to play the proud native son. A fresher wound came in 2001, when Naipaul omitted any mention of Trinidad from his initial press release after winning the Nobel Prize, which many here saw as a deliberate rebuff. And last year, during a visit sponsored by the University of the West Indies, Naipaul more than lived up to his reputation for cantankerousness, prompting disapproving press coverage after he snapped at a group of students at a Hindu girls’ high school.

Despite the cantankerousness, I’d say it’s still a semi-sympathetic portrait of Naipaul.