Laila Lalami

The Berlin International Literature Festival is calling for a worldwide reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry on October 5.  If your school or cultural institution is interested, please see details here.

My husband sent me a link to an old piece by Ian McEwan on 9/11.  It’s part of the Guardian’s Writers on 9/11 series.

I’m delighted to hear, via the blog of the NBCC, that the National Book Foundation will honor Maxine Hong Kingston with its 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. One of the books that has marked me most is Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (I first came across it as an undergraduate student at Mohammed-V). I still have my old copy, most of it underlined or filled with comments. And nowadays I even teach portions of it in my creative nonfiction classes. It’s so nice to see her work recognized.

Well, that was fast. The shortlist for the 2008 Booker Prizes has already been announced:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Since The Enchantress didn’t make the list, people will probably remind John Sutherland of his promise.

The longlist for the Booker Prize for 2008 has been announced.  It includes:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
From A to X by John Berger
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

The only one I’ve read so far is Rushdie’s Enchantress. I also have Netherland, and hope to get to it in the next week or two.

Last Wednesday, the Moroccan blogger Mohamed Erraji penned a column for the website Hespress, in which he criticized King Mohammed for what he called “policies of charity” that are “destroying the country.” On Thursday, Erraji was reportedly questioned over the column. On Friday, he was arrested in Agadir for “lack of respect due to the king.” And, on Monday, he was brought to court for trial, fined 5,000 dirhams, and sentenced to two years in prison.

The column itself is available in Arabic here, in English here, and in French here. It starts with an anecdote about the king giving a policeman a transportation license (such licenses guarantee some income for life), then questions whether such practices encourage the creation of an independent society.

The arrest marks the first time anyone has been arrested for a blog post in Morocco, and, given the Moroccan government’s touchiness, I can guarantee it is not the last time. But I would like to make one small point: Erraji’s criticism is quite mild compared with what one can read in such French-language Moroccan magazines as Tel Quel or Le Journal. But these publications enjoy the support of many international groups (such as Reporters Without Borders) and so the government often has to think twice before arresting one of their journalists or editors. But because Erraji writes in Arabic, and because he writes for Hespress, a website whose quality is quite questionable (it’s very populist and sometimes inaccurate), and because he is not part of the connected elite, his right to freedom of expression has simply been denied and his case has been even more bungled than usual.

A website has been set up to defend Erraji: Help Erraji. I wish there was also a website to help Morocco get a clue on press freedom.

Reviews for Fall books are starting to come in.  One of the novels I’m most looking forward to reading is Marilynne Robinson’s Home. It was reviewed by Emily Barton in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times.

Unlike novels that delight in plot twists and structural play, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gilead” is seemingly straightforward and free of pyrotechnics. Instead, the novel takes its sweet, molasses-slow time, and in the process achieves depths of pathos and empathy rarely seen in contemporary fiction. What drives “Gilead” is the voice of its protagonist, the Rev. John Ames: his prose flexible and spare, steeped in Scripture and the writings of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. Yet Ames also has an abiding tenderness for the world; when he sees his son blowing soap bubbles, he describes one as floating “past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst.”

So little happens, in an outward sense, that Robinson barely divides “Gilead” into chapters. (There are two.) But events resonate so profoundly, they almost cannot be contained within the book. This is perhaps part of why Robinson has chosen to revisit certain scenes in her new novel, “Home,” this time writing from the perspective of Glory Boughton, one of “Gilead’s” minor characters. Yet this co-quel has a beauty all its own.

The rest of the piece is available online.

During the primaries, I was often surprised at the line of thinking that equated Barack Obama with the status quo, simply because he was not progressive enough.  Of course Obama was not progressive enough.  But now that Governor Sarah Palin–a woman who believes that Iraq is “a task from God”–has been added to the Republican ticket, perhaps we will see a little clarity on the left about what exactly is at stake in this election.

I think Sarah Vowell puts it well in her opinion piece for the New York Times:

I’m convinced that the immediate mass flip-out over the Palin nomination can’t be entirely explained by sexism, elitism or partisan animosity. It was a symptom of just how much the presidential future is a suspense movie scored by Bernard Herrmann. It’s enough of a nail-biter to throw in with a two-person ticket for four years. So if newscasters don’t even know how to pronounce the vice presidential pick’s name upon announcement, the violins of apprehension start to screech “Psycho” shower-scene loud.

The good news is that Governor Palin has sufficient experience in public life to leave behind enough of a paper trail that we can discern her positions on many of the most important issues of the day. The bad news is that after taking this crash course in where she stands, I know that if she were elected I would be afraid to leave my apartment after sundown.

During a gubernatorial debate in 2006, Governor Palin claimed that if her daughter, then 16, were impregnated as the result of being raped, Ms. Palin would hope that the girl would “choose life,” which is a polite way of saying she would expect a tenth-grader to give birth to her rapist’s baby.

Here’s a not-so-polite fact about the United States: According to Amnesty International, a woman is raped here every six minutes.

Having been successful at peddling a war in 2003 by shutting out or co-opting the media, the Republicans hope to do the same trick.  Sarah Palin has been unavailable to the press since the announcement, and any coverage of her in the press has been called “outrageous,” “over the line,” or “sexist.”  Finally this weekend, where her absence on Sunday morning talk shows was glaring, the campaign announced that she would sit down with….Charlie Gibson, the same man who was widely derided for the way in which he handled the Clinton-Obama debate.  Expect a lot of softballs for Palin, and a lot of lies.

NPR’s Gregory Feifer files a short piece about what he calls a ‘literary renaissance’ in Russia.  Readers have not been seduced by the availability of commercial literature after the fall of the Soviet Union and, in fact, are drawn to serious literature now, under Putin’s repressive regime.

Kind of puts me in mind of that line by Harry Lime in The Third Man: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The most recent issue of Bookforum is available online, and I’ve already bookmarked several pieces to read: Jennifer Egan on Andre Brink’s Other Lives,  Maya Jaggi on Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, and Amy Gerstler on Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles.