Laila Lalami

Powell’s bookstore has come up with a really neat idea: an indie subscription club whose members get a package of new books every six weeks. The package might include a signed first edition, or a title from the author’s backlist, or an advance copy of a new title, but the coolest part about this is that you don’t know what you’ll get until the package arrives. This would make a great gift. (Hint, hint, Alex.)

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday on the (very profitable) business of hymen restoration in France, and today Slate picks up the subject as well. Both articles mention the case of the Muslim marriage that was annulled by a French court because the bride misrepresented herself as a virgin, but neither one mentions that the groom in the case is actually a French convert who was upset that his North African wife had lied to him about her past (in)experience. He asked for an annulment, and his legal case was based on the fact that she misrepresented herself, not on the substance of the misrepresentation. Naturally many Muslims and non-Muslims in France were upset with this ridiculous ruling because it leaves the door open for retrograde ways of handling the institution of marriage. These two points were not really made in the articles. It never ceases to amaze me how much importance is given in the Western press to what Muslim women wear on their heads, or what they have between their legs. I only wish that their education and their health warranted such attention.

I doubt if Ahmed Herzenni, the president of the Advisory Council on Human Rights (CCDH), who was visiting the United States to speak to the Moroccan community about his organization’s work, expected the reception he ended up getting in Washington, DC. The Moroccans in attendance asked him pointed questions about the kingdom’s appalling record on human rights, the lack of independence of the judiciary, the elections, and so on. A couple of the attendees got very upset. You can watch video segments from the meeting here. (Scroll on the right hand side to see all five videos.)

The Los Angeles Times Book Review has posted its summer 2008 reading list. Ordinarily, I’d be looking through it to see if there’s something interesting I’m missing, but this summer I’m trying to read older books for a change. At the moment, for instance, I am re-reading, for the first time in twenty years, Driss Chraibi’s Le Passé Simple. My God, I had forgotten how violent that novel is, in everything from action to language.

Nice news out of Gaza: The seven Palestinian students who had been awarded Fulbright scholarships will be able to come to the United States after all. Proof that, sometimes, reports about injustice lead to pressure, and pressure leads to resolution.

Zakes Mda has written a lovely piece for the Boston Review about his writing process, specifically his approach to realism and characterization. He discusses J.M. Coetzee’s incredible novel Waiting for the Barbarians, placing it in the context of apartheid-era South African fiction, which was often starkly realistic:

What others saw as a failure to represent lived experience appeared to me—I was then living in exile—as a refreshing way to re-imagine South Africa and transcend the repetition of the horrors reported every day in newspapers. Waiting for the Barbarians addressed the brutality of colonialism in a timeless manner and extended the borders of “empire” far beyond those of South Africa: to the rest of Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. Springing from the particular circumstances of South Africa, it spoke to a universe in which the state became increasingly terroristic in its defense of imperial values. The timelessness was rendered all the more striking to me when one of my students at Ohio University asked if the novel was written after 9/11.

He also describes how Coetzee’s attention to characterization helped him to see the need to create emotionally and intellectually complex South African characters:

In 1984 my play, The Road, won the Christina Crawford Award of what was then called the American Theater Association and was read on stage at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco. Theater educators and scouts gathered and offered their critiques. I was taken aback by one particular comment: according to one critic, the Afrikaner character was a thorough scoundrel without a single redeeming feature. (…)The play is highly allegorical, for allegory is the mode of oral literature and folklore in that part of the world. South African theater was allegorical long before Coetzee. Its humor was in its absurdity, which was largely the absurdity of the Afrikaner character and everything he stood for. So, what more did the San Francisco critic want from it? What redeeming attribute could an Afrikaner character possibly have, especially after oppressing me for more than three hundred years?

Of course, real people are never as sharply contrasted as some heroes and villains in fiction, and Mda had to learn to create more complex Afrikaner characters.

Related: On Zakes Mda’s novel Cion for The Nation .

My site has been down intermittently today, so I wasn’t able to link to the news that Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination. For those of you who are not won over to the young senator from Illinois, let me just say that there’ll be plenty of time to be skeptical. But for now why not enjoy this historic day? One hundred and forty five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and forty five years after “I Have a Dream,” an African American has become his party’s nominee for the presidency of the United States. That is reason to rejoice.

Goodnight Bush:

You can read the first few pages by visiting the site.

The New York Times Book Review asked a few poets and novelists which books they would recommend for the three presidential candidates. I think my favorite suggestions are those given by Lorrie Moore:

For Obama: “The Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James. A virtuous orphan is plotted against by a charming, ruthless couple the orphan once trusted and admired.

For Clinton: “Macbeth,” by William Shakespeare. The timeless tale of how untethered ambition and early predictions may carry a large price tag.

For McCain: “Tales From the Brothers Grimm.” In case more are needed.

Meanwhile, Gore Vidal contributes a typically Vidalian recommendation: “I can only answer in the negative: I want them not to read The New York Times, while subscribing to The Financial Times.”

Newsweek’s Lorraine Ali gets the final word on that silly Dunkin’ Donuts/Keffiyeh controversy: “Shouldn’t we be more offended [Rachael] Ray was shilling their weak iced coffee, a beverage that should be criticized for impersonating, well, iced coffee?”