Laila Lalami

On the plane to Orlando, I re-read, for the first time since I was fourteen years old, Albert Camus’ L’étranger. I remembered some passages from the novel so well I could have recited them (C’est alors que tout a vacillé etc.) My unease with the book as a teenager did not change, though, and in fact it grew worse. Meursault’s killing of the character referred to simply as “the Arab,” the complete absence of any dialogue from the three Arab men who confront Raymond and Meursault on the beach, the fact that the only Arab character who says anything is Raymond’s abused and oppressed girlfriend, the absence of the Arab man’s family or any Arab witnesses at the trial: these are not coincidences, naturally, but clear narrative choices Camus made. One might argue that Meursault’s fight with the chaplain and his realization at the end are an assertion of the Self in the face of an indifferent universe and a moralizing society, but I think that assertion about the absurdity of life comes by way of victimizing the Other. Camus gives us a vision of the world that leaves nothing to compassion, emotion, or humanity.

My review of M.G. Vassanji’s new novel The Assassin’s Song appeared in last weekend’s Chicago Tribune. Here’s the opening paragraph:

In February 2002, a group of Hindu demonstrators converged on the town of Ayodhya, India, to demand that a temple be built on the site of the Babri Masjid, a 16th Century mosque that had been destroyed a decade earlier. On their way back from the rally, their train stopped in the city of Godhra, in Gujarat state, where a group of Muslims standing on the platform allegedly heckled them. Part of the train carrying the Hindu demonstrators caught fire, and nearly 60 people were killed.

The deaths — which new evidence suggests may have been caused by a cooking stove inside the train car — led to months-long attacks on the state’s entire Muslim minority. As many as 2,000 people were murdered. Muslim women were raped and burned alive, and their babies were torn from their wombs. Using voter lists, mobs targeted and looted Muslim businesses. By the time the killings stopped, 150,000 Muslims had been displaced.

The sheer viciousness and depressing regularity of communal riots in Gujarat make it an unlikely setting for a novel about a mystical saint who transcends religious identity, yet that is where M.G. Vassanji places the action in his new novel, “The Assassin’s Song.” Alternating chapters tell the stories of Karsan Dargawalla, an Indian college professor who returns home to Gujarat after having spent long years abroad, and Nur Fazal, a 13th Century Sufi Muslim who arrives in Gujarat seeking refuge with the Hindu king, Vishal Dev. Karsan is Nur’s descendant, his successor — and his avatar.

You can read the review in full here.

I am reading Zakya Daoud’s new book, Les Années Lamalif. 1958-1988. Trente ans de journalisme au Maroc. Daoud is a fascinating person, and one hopes that a proper biography will someday be devoted to her. Born Jacqueline David in a small town in Normandy, she went to journalism school in Paris. There, she met Mohammed Loghlam, whom she married and followed to Casablanca in 1958, after the completion of their degrees. Loghlam applied formally for Moroccan citizenship (he was born in Casablanca to a Moroccan mother and an Algerian father), for himself and for their son, but when the citizenship papers came through, they included Jacqueline’s as well, even though she never asked for them. This clerical error resulted in her becoming one of very few naturalized Moroccans. Later on, the editor of Jeune Afrique suggested that she take on a pseudonym when she started writing for him, and that was how Jacqueline David became Zakya Daoud. Years later, her detractors still used her foreign birth to criticize her and to deny her the right to speak out on any number of political issues in Morocco. The wound of being called “nesranya” is very raw still, as her many references to it in the book attest.

Les Années Lamalif is a chronicle of Daoud’s work as a journalist at various organizations in Morocco, including the Radio Télévision Marocaine, and all the difficulties that such work entailed, including several vicious altercations with Moulay Ahmed Alaoui, the imprisonment of many friends or acquaintances, the constant threat of censorship. In 1966, using all their savings, Daoud and Loghlam founded Lamalif , which would later become a reference for many in the opposition movement. Daoud published the work of Abdallah Laroui, Mohammed Tozy, Paul Pascon, and many others. It’s very clear that this was a period not just of political upheaval, but also of great cultural and literary activity. There are a few gossipy tidbits (e.g. How the Souffles group became upset when a Lamalif article by a young Salim Jay ridiculed a reading by some of their poets.) There are also disturbing anecdotes (e.g. Daoud being required to go to the local commissariat regularly to be questioned about matters of public knowledge.) Most of all, Les Années Lamalif is a rigorous account of all the work that went into contesting the established power structure, into saying No to the Makhzen’s domination.

Although the book is exceedingly interesting, it suffers occasionally from a tendency to list series of events rather than placing them in a narrative, whether personal or historical. This may be due to the fact that Daoud’s journals were stolen from her by Moroccan security on a flight to Paris in 1988, so she had no access to her personal notes from those years, and had to rely instead on memory, documentation, and research. Still, this is an important book, a reference for the younger generation. May they read it and draw the necessary parallels.

I picked up a copy of Colum McCann’s new novel, Zoli, when I was in New York for the PEN festival, on the recommendation of a couple of friends, including my editor at Algonquin. The story begins in the 1930s, when a young Roma girl named Marienka (nicknamed Zoli) loses her entire family in an attack by Hlinka guards. (Fascist attacks against such minorities were common in Czechoslovakia at the time.) Zoli escapes with her grandfather, and together they join a kumpanija, a traveling group of Romani musicians. Zoli’s extraordinary ability to remember and to write songs and poems soon attracts notice–from Swann, an expat translator, and Stransky, a Slovak poet and editor. Zoli’s growing fame is quickly co-opted by the Communists, who want to make of her a poster child of Romani “integration” in a new society. The novel explores questions of belonging–national, cultural, linguistic–as well as class and ideology, without ever once slipping into a harangue. A rare feat these days. McCann immersed himself in Roma culture to write this novel, and the care with which he draws this world is palpable. He breathes life into very different characters, giving them each the space in which to tell their story. A great book.

A father and son walk along a road in a post-apocalyptic future. Around them, everything is dead or dying. Between sunup and sundown, the sky’s color changes by only a few shades of gray. It’s numbingly cold, and ash falls from the sky nearly all the time. The reader is never told what could have caused the world to turn out like this, but it’s not hard to imagine that it could be a nuclear explosion. In the end, it doesn’t much matter what caused it all, because there is life to attend to. The little boy needs to be fed and protected, and the father devotes himself to that. There are other survivors, but it’s hard to tell who “the good guys” are, those “who carry the fire.” McCarthy ventures into the deepest, darkest recesses of the human heart, and chronicles what he sees in vivid, yet restrained prose. Some survivors engage in cannibalism; others have organized in armies, red scarves at their necks, killing and stealing and rampaging; slavery reappears; and through all this madness the father must find food and protect his little boy. I had to put this book down a couple of times because I was not sure I could finish it. But I cared about the characters far too much to stay away, and so I picked it up again and finished it in one sitting. What Cormac McCarthy has done in his new novel is difficult, brave, and incredibly well-executed. A masterpiece.

I’ve had a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for a long, long while, and I finally got to read it last week, on the plane to New York. It’s her memoir of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of a massive heart attack while their only daughter, Quintana, was in the hospital, receiving treatment for septic shock. (After the book was completed, but before its publication, Quintana passed away, in an almost unbearable post scriptum.) Didion chronicles the process of grief and mourning with stunning clarity, and many times I was moved to tears and had to put the book down. But there were also moments when I was frustrated by the sheer amount of control in the prose, as if the words could somehow serve as refuge from things Didion might not want the reader to know.

I went to Rabat to pick up my mail at the Fulbright office today, and I found several packages waiting for me. In the lot was a copy of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I started reading on the train back home. The story is told through a monologue by a young Pakistani man, sitting across from an American stranger in the Old Anarkali neighborhood of Lahore. I am enthralled by it so far, and hope it can deliver on its promise in the end.

Updated to say that I thought the second half of the book didn’t hold as well as the first half. Changez’s transformation from a successful analyst to a disgruntled slack is not earned, I’m afraid. It fits the plot, but doesn’t fit the character. I did like this book a lot, though, for other reasons. I could see the influence of Tayib Salih and Joseph Conrad, and if I were not so completely busy with my own novel, I think I would have written about The Reluctant Fundamentalist at great length.

This weekend I tried reading Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack, translated by John Cullen. Khadra, you may recall, is the pseudonym of Algerian novelist (and ex army officer) Mohamed Moulessehoul. While his earlier work was set in his native Algeria, The Swallows of Kabul was set in Afghanistan, The Attack is set in Israel, and his latest, The Sirens of Baghdad, is set in Iraq. (By the way, do you think his next one will be set in Iran? With a title like The Sparrows of Tehran?)

The Attack is about a successful Arab Israeli surgeon named Amin Jaafari who works to save the many victims of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, only to discover that his wife Sihem was behind the terrorist attack. Let’s just say I couldn’t get very far into the novel. I thought it relied too much on cliché both in terms of character development, and in terms of the language itself (e.g., “The eyes in [a sheikh] ascetic’s face glinted like the blade of a scimitar.”)

I just finished reading Tahmima Anam’s first book, A Golden Age, a historical novel set during the Bangladeshi war of independence. It follows a young widow named Rehana, as she tries to keep her small family–her son Sohail, and her daughter Maya–together through the horror of the 1971 war with Pakistan. A Golden Age has one of the best opening chapters I’ve read in a while, and so it was good to see it included in the latest issue of Granta magazine (Granta 96: War Zones).

Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s It’s Not And All Night Fair is one of those books where very little happens–a man travels from Jakarta to his home village in Java to see his father, who is fatally ill–and yet I couldn’t put it down. It paints the portrait of a complex father-son relationship in modern-day Indonesia. The father fought for independence from the Dutch, chose to stay in his village, and has clung to his ideals, while the narrator has only known the corrupt rule of Sukarno, has moved to the big city, and is mostly preoccupied with making it. Once, the father had been offered a chance to join a local assembly, which would have meant he could have become part of the ruling elite, but he refused the appointment: “The local assembly is only a stage. And I don’t fancy becoming a clown–even a big clown.” By contrast, the son worries about the cost of everything, and describes his salary as being ” only enough to allow you to go on breathing.” We get a picture of a country in which hopes of a better life after independence have been dashed, and where the older man has more aspirations than the younger one. The prose is very plain, but the images are striking. On a long evening, for example, we are told that “the night outside went on swallowing the span of men’s lives.” The book stayed with me.

It’s Not And All Night Fair was originally published in 1951, translated from Bahasa Indonesia by C.W. Watson in 1973, and finally released in the United States last fall.