Laila Lalami

I recently wrote a piece about Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor for The Nation‘s online section on books and the arts. Here’s how it opens:

On first glance, Tom McCarthy’s new film, The Visitor, seems to set itself up as one of those dreadful movies in which a white, male protagonist witnesses some predicament of people of color and then, innocently and chivalrously, proceeds to save them. Think Blood Diamond or Rendition or The Last King of Scotland. Some people cry during these movies; I usually yawn and check my watch. But The Visitor quickly turns the formula on its head. For one thing, the main conflict that propels the story is caused by all the characters, and, for another, whatever realizations are made at the end of the film do not neatly separate the characters as savior and saved.

The entire piece is freely available here: “Looking Past Clichés.”

(Photo credit: Overture Films)

When I was getting ready to go to work yesterday, the headlines said that a cyclone hit Myanmar, and that the death toll may be as high as 4,000. By the time I finished teaching, the headlines said 10,000. And this morning the number has risen to 15,000 (now 30,000.) It’s hard to fathom what that means for the survivors, for the families, for the country. But already the humanitarian crisis is being politicized. On both sides.

I loved Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly when I read it almost ten years ago, so I was quite reluctant to see the film adaptation, even though I’d heard that it was directed by Julian Schnabel. The movie arrived via Netflix on Friday and…it’s incredible. Schnabel does what so few directors are capable of doing when it comes to adaptations of novels, which is to say, translate literary language into visual language. What a beautiful film.

(photo credit)

If you’ve sat for baccalaureate exams anywhere in the Arab world, this little passage from Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun will bring about a bout of nostalgia (or perhaps panic, depending on your grammar skills):

The afternoon is the time for memorising and the morning the time for brainwork. Not that there is much brainwork to any of this. Arabic grammar is about the only thing that can count as brainwork, parsing sentences: the Deed, the Doer, and the Done-To; the Added and the Added-To; the Attribute and the State; the Circumstance of Time and Place and, most problematic of all: the Built upon the Unknown, in which the logical Done-To assumes the form and function of the Doer. These have to be worked out.

When is Soueif coming out with a new novel? It’s been almost ten years since the last one.