Laila Lalami

Over at Salon, Daniel Alarcon analyzes some of the reactions he’s been getting recently while on tour promoting his collection, War By Candlelight.

Last April I was invited to a literary fundraiser of sorts. It was a fancy affair, full of very wealthy people and well-dressed waiters carrying trays of wine and strange-looking appetizers. A couple of dozen writers had been invited, and we were plied with alcohol and dispersed into the party. I fell into a few pleasant conversations with some very kind people, all of them genuinely excited for me — You’re so young to have published a book! etc. — and then was seated at dinner next to a woman in her 60s, who spent her meal asking me about the exotic origins of my last name. I’m Peruvian, I told her. But that last name, it reminds me of a bug that bit me when I was living in Mexico! Oh, I said. Where does it come from? she asked. I explained to her at one point that most words in Spanish that begin in “Al” are Arabic in origin, that the Moorish influence transformed the language, so that my last name may have been Arcon or Arco. I’m not sure why I told her this. I’m neither Spanish nor Moorish, and certainly not a linguist, but I felt she needed something to keep her occupied for a bit.

She gave me this wide-eyed look: That is so topical, she said. Like al-Qaida.

Even in the dim light, I’m sure she sensed she had stunned me: not that I’m saying you’re one of those people.

Oh, no, I stammered. Because I’m not.

She patted me on the shoulder. I understand, she said in a conspiratorial whisper; my daughter married a Mexican.

It goes downhill from there, with Alarcon getting increasingly frustrated that he doesn’t fit the image that is expected of the Latino writer, which is to say that of the struggling immigrant who writes novels or stories that are merely thinly disguised versions of his autobiography, how it’s all heartbreaking and so, so real.

Oh and the answer to that question? Clearly, one who can write.

Over at Slate, Stephen Metcalf deconstructs reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, starting with how it affected 19th century readers to how it is loathed (or rehabilitated by more modern readers, including African-Americans and women.

James Baldwin, in a famous essay for The Partisan Review in 1949, saw the priority of Tom over Harris as anything but innocent and pious. Harris, Baldwin argued, is a “race apart” from the novel’s blackest characters the little girl Topsy, and Tom himself. Harris’ dignity is therefore tied, as Baldwin puts it, to his being “sufficiently un-Negroid to pass through town, a fugitive from his master, disguised as a Spanish gentleman, attracting no attention beyond admiration.” It is tied, in other words, to his whiteness. Tom is therefore Stowe’s “only black man,” whom she has “robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.” Baldwin loathed the novel, which he felt yoked a terror of blackness to a “terror of damnation,” then “saved” Tom by rendering him an intellectual and sexual eunuch who gives himself over entirely to martyrdom. Baldwin finally sets his thermometer on roast: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that terror that activates a lynch mob.”

Metcalf also cites Jane Smiley’s reactions to the work (she considers it passionate and insightful). I tend to agree more with Baldwin than Smiley on this one. Metcalf concludes by saying that “maybe we can delineate the understandable limits of its heroism and admit its manifest crudity as a work of literary art.”

Michael at Lit Saloon links to this Observer article about Penguin’s plans to celebrate its 70th anniversary by issuing 70 short titles–but only two of the authors are non-whites.

Although Penguin has published two of the most important figures in modern black literature, James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe, neither is included on a list that finds room for popular modern names such as Jamie Oliver, Marian Keyes, Gervase Phinn and India Knight, as well as paying tribute to significant white landmarks of world literature such as Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Theroux, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Sigmund Freud and even Homer, a segment of whose Odyssey gets a look in.

The only two black authors included are Zadie Smith, the young Briton who made her name with the award-winning novel White Teeth, and Hari Kunzru, who is best known for The Impressionist and Transmission, and has a worldwide following.

If this is a list meant to represent the best of Penguin’s work, then the exclusion of Achebe makes no sense. And if it is meant to represent their best selling authors, then Achebe–who is routinely assigned in high school and college classes–should certainly have fit the criteria. The publisher’s response is that they weren’t going to do “quotas,” that they were looking at “sales only.” In that case, what about Salman Rushdie? Isn’t he published by Penguin (through Viking)? The sales from The Satanic Verses alone probably surpass those of any writer on that list. And he’s not included either. Next time I hear someone moaning about a minority-only prize, I’ll have to remind them of things like this, which are far more common than people think.

Confessions Of A Compulsive Reader
By
Lauren Baratz-Logsted

The words blur together on the page, becoming one long stream of fast-moving letters…

Oh, no! My life has become a cliche!

On New Year’s Eve, having failed in previous years to reach my goal of becoming perfectly thin, I decided to set my resolve in a new direction: in 2005, I decided, I would read 365 books, one for each day of the year.

I’ve always been a big reader. Since the age of 10, 32 years ago, I’ve averaged 100 to 250 books per year. I read widely, I read everything. Since my first novel, The Thin Pink Line, was published in 2003, I’ve given a lot of talks as well as receiving a lot of mail from readers, and often the question arises: What makes a good writer? I always answer that, to me, the most important thing is to be a big reader. And it amazes me how often, when I ask a would-be published author what they’re reading at the time, the response comes back: “Nothing. I don’t have much time for reading.” To me, this is like saying, “I want to be a brain surgeon, but I really don’t have time for med school.” A.O. Scott, reviewing Joyce Carol Oates’ Uncensored: Views and (Re)views in the NYTBR on April 17, wrote, “Of course, every serious writer of fiction must also be a serious reader; the only way the art can really be mastered is through a compulsive, self-administered pedagogy of worship, derision, imitation and intimidation.” While I find myself, these days, disagreeing with much that gets written in the NYTBR, I believe in Mr. Scott’s sentiment wholeheartedly.

Once upon a time, very early on in my writing journey, the dying novelist Lyll Becerra de Jenkins, mother of a writing friend, heard I’d made the statement, “The only thing that ever bothers me about my own mortality is that I know I’ll never live long enough to read all the books I want to read,” and she asked to meet me, a meeting I still treasure. Since then, I’ve grown a bit older and had a child, so naturally there are now a few other things that bother me about my own mortality, not least of which is that I now know I’ll never live long enough to write all the books I want to write either. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with me, but the list of titles on the storyboard in my basement of books I want to write is long and vita is all too brevis.

But no matter how burning the desire to get those books written before I turn my toes up and they cart me away, the impulse to read remains. In my life so far, I’ve read nearly all of Shakespeare, for example, not because I plan on spouting iambic pentameter at the next turn, but because it informs, if only marginally, the books I create.

It is the impulse to inform that writing, and inform it as quickly as possible, that I think led me to begin this insane yearlong journey. My original intent was tied up, to some degree, in a desire to define myself as a writer. I am blessed – or cursed, depending on how you view it – with the ability to come up with ideas for high-concept books that I can then produce fairly quickly, if by no mean painlessly. Despite the state of near madness that breakneck pace induces in me, it is simply all too easy. It’s too easy for me to skate, too easy for me to say, “Oh, that’s good enough.” So I guess I felt that if I crammed enough of other people’s books into myself, I’d be in a better position to finally say, “This is what I despise. This is what I admire. This is what I will strive for.”

Thus far, this Sisyphean journey has proved thematically to be not unlike Book #134, Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women Who Climbed K2, by Jennifer Jordan, which I read last week. Currently 141 books into this insanity, I’m finding my reasons for selecting books is evolving. I’m finding the onus has turned away from my own previously obsessive-compulsive need to read every word: it is now the author’s job to fully command my attention or run the risk I will skim. And, finally, I’m finding sometimes I select a book for sheer brevity so I can get my daily quota in.

You probably noticed the next-to-last sentence in the above paragraph, which answers the question of how I’m managing to read so much – while still writing every day, while still promoting my books, while still keeping an incredibly bright five-year-old sufficiently entertained: I skim. Oh, by no means all the time. In fact, I’ve read every single word of every nonfiction book I’ve read since January 1, including Giovanni Caprara’s The Solar System, a book I scarcely understood, science being my weak point. But having once been a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, I am well versed in the art of skimming. I’d feel a lot worse about that admission were it not for the fact I’ve read articles in the Guardian about reviewers and blurbers who don’t read the books they’re assigned…at all.

When I first started reviewing books, I read every word, just as I had compulsively read every word of every book I’d read up to that point in my life. But somewhere into my 292-book reviewing career with PW, I discovered something: if I could tell by page five that a book was not going to be to my taste, that I would in fact hate it, the resulting review was about as nasty as it could get. After all, I’d suffered. Why, then, would there be any grace left in me? So I learned, in those cases, to skim judiciously. And I discovered that I could still review a book both descriptively and analytically, and yet the resulting review was fairer, because I was no longer bitter. There was no longer a need for me to be cruel and I cannot help but think the world a better place with a little less cruelty.

Some people, knowing about my project, have wondered if it’s true what they say about quality, that after a while it jumps out at you. The answer is simple: yes. For while I may skim, sometimes, I never do it when an author commands my attention, not when someone is good enough to make me slow down and savor every word.

The following is a list of the books that, so far this year, have made me sit up and take notice:

The Queen of the South, Arturo Perez-Reverte
Something Borrowed, Emily Giffin
The Kreutzer Sonata, Margriet de Moor
Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland
The Autobiography of God, Julius Lester
The White Rose, Jean Hanff Korelitz
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, Marion Meade
Will They Ever Trust Us Again?, Michael Moore
Strange But True, John Searles
The World Still Melting, Robley Wilson
The Pleasure Was Mine, Tommy Hays
102 Minutes, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
The Falls, Joyce Carol Oates
Lighthousekeeping, Jeanette Winterson
The Bones, Seth Greenland
Savage Summit, Jennifer Jordan
Windows on the World, Frederic Beigbeder

I look at the above list and try to see the common ground in the books I’ve felt passionate about so far this year. On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be any. Certainly, you can’t find books further apart than Emily Griffin’s Something Borrowed, with its uber-pink cover, and 102 Minutes, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, which follows hundreds of lives and deaths during the time it took for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse after being attacked. And, indeed, they have nothing in common, save for the fact that both books moved me for different reasons: the former, for taking a seemingly unsympathetic situation – a maid-of-honor sleeps with her best friend the bride’s fianc� before the wedding – and artfully exposing the flawed humanity in us all; the latter, because despite the sadness and frustration in reading about all of the mistakes that were made on that most awful of awful days, there are some shining accounts of bravery, in particular those enacted by Frank DeMartini and Pablo Ortiz, that will remain indelibly in my mind for as long as I have memory.

Really, though, when I look at the nonfiction on the list, there’s no connection: an account of writers in the ’20s, the letters of soldiers to Michael Moore, an account of September 11, an account of five female mountain-climbers who summitted K2.

It’s when I look at the fiction – moving past the fact that it’s comprised of both literary and commercial, since I could never abide a diet of just one or the other any more than I could stand to eat chocolate mousse for every meal of the day – that I see the common thread. All of those books achieve the blend I find most pleasing in fiction: the books that are mostly heavy still have a trace of irony or humor to some of the proceedings; the books that are seemingly light all have some sort of serious social commentary underlacing the whole. They are the kinds of books I like to read best, perhaps because they are also the kinds of books I like to write best. I see myself – surely not in the actual writing; no, I have no pretensions of that – but in the intention and the palpable love of creation. So that’s where the journey has brought me thus far: to a place where I can see where I’ve been and where I want to go deeper.

Who knows where the next 224 books this year will take me?

I do know that a friend has embarked on a similar journey, in his case tackling a short story a day for the entire year. And maybe at the end we’ll collaborate on a joint tale: The 365-Book, 365-Story Year, detailing in fuller form our individual motives, experiences, and where the journey finally washes us up. Regardless of the future, right now I hear Book #2 calling my name, Ginger Strand’s Flight.

Looks like it’s time for me to go read.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of The Thin Pink Line and Crossing the Line. Her third novel, A Little Change of Face, will be published in July 2005. Her essay, “If Jane Austen Were Writing Today,” is collected in Flirting with Pride and Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives on the Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece, edited by Jennifer Crusie and due out from Benbella Books on September 1.

Hedgebrook‘s latest initiative, in partnership with the Arab American Community Coalition, is nothing short of groundbreaking. It’s called Women Writers of the Arab World and it brings together six writers from different countries and different experiences: Raja Alem of Saudi Arabia, Suheir Hammad of Palestine and the US, Choman Hardi of Iraqi Kurdistan and the UK, Alia Mamdouh of Iraq and France, Somaya Ramadan of Egypt, and Ibtihal Salem of Egypt. The women were awarded a month-long residency at the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, where they worked on a fiction or non-fiction project. In addition to this gift of time and space, the writers were given the rare opportunity to meet with each other and with readers from the Northwest, through readings, panels, and workshops (listed here.)

This weekend, Alex and I drove up to Seattle to attend one of the events, which was held in a packed auditorium at the University of Washington. Moderated by Therese Saliba, the panel featured Raja Alem, Choman Hardi, and Ibtihal Salem. They read from their work (poetry for Hardi, short fiction for Salem and Alem) and discussed the role of translation in their lives. Hardi made a conscious choice to start writing in English; she was dissatisfied with translations of her poetry from the Kurdish, which came out sounding ‘precious’ and so she preferred to write directly in English and to reach English readers that way rather than through translations. Salem stressed the importance of culture in translation. “It’s important,” she said, “that the translator be not just familiar with the language but with its people. Ideally the translator has lived in the cuture he/she translates.” And Saudi-born Alem talked about how, despite her country’s censors, she has managed to have her voice heard within the Kingdom. “The trouble,” she said, “is getting heard outside of it, because all the outside world wants is stereotypes of veils.” After writing seven novels in Arabic, Alem has now written her first in English.

Later, at the post-event reception, I spent way too much money at the Elliot Bay Book Company stand, which had a very impressive array of literature by Arab and Arab American authors. I also got to meet and chat with uber-cool poetess Suheir Hammad, and with the amazing Fadia Faqir, who was due to fly back to the U.K. the next day. A wonderful event. I only wish that there were more like these in the Northwest.

Related:
Seattle P.I.: Arab women writers take part in ‘an amazing event.’
Seattle Times: Arab women writers making Seattle appearances.
Seattle Weekly: Unveiling the Middle East.
Moorishgirl: At Hedgebrook, Peace and Quiet, At Last.

Richard Nash writes in to alert us about an interesting new book from Soft Skull Press: We Are Iran, by Nasrin Alavi, which reviews the thousands of Iranian blogs that have cropped up since 2001 (making Farsi one of the pre-eminent languages of the blogosphere.) The book is all the more important in the face of the recent crackdown on Iranian bloggers by their government. You can also read this article from Open Democracy about the role that Iranian bloggers are playing in their country’s forthcoming election.

Journalists who are silenced in newspapers quickly find an audience for their writing in blogs or news websites.

It is precisely because so many of these affluent young people are online, that the candidates are reaching out to them on the web. So far, a dozen news websites have appeared in direct or subtle support of candidates in the pre-election period. They function as the unofficial public-relations machinery of the candidates, especially in the recent campaign wars.

The main newspapers would never dare author the kind of views that are expressed on these sites but they have no problem quoting them. In this way tough censorship rules are being circumvented and an unprecedented amount of information is available to the public.

I’m not sure how I managed to miss this, but apparently Israeli journalist Amira Hass gave a talk recently at the Lannan Foundation, and was later interviewed by Ahdaf Soueif (whose new book, Mezzaterra, is due out in the U.S. in October.) You can listen to the talk and conversation here.

Thomas Friedman’s latest book gets a significantly chillier reception in the Guardian than in Friedman’s own paper, the New York Times.

In her introduction to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Zadie Smith says of Alden Pyle, the American of the title: “His worldly innocence is a kind of fundamentalism.” She goes on: “Reading the novel again reinforced my fear of all the Pyles around the world. They do not mean to hurt us, but they do.”

Greene has Pyle travelling with books such as The Role of the West and The Challenge to Democracy. A modern-day Greene could substitute the works of the real-life Thomas Friedman – a contemporary quiet American. Like Pyle, Friedman is “impregnably armed by his good intentions and his ignorance”. In The World Is Flat Friedman has produced an epyllion to the glories of globalisation with only three flaws: the writing style is prolix, the author is monumentally self-obsessed, and its content has the depth of a puddle.

The reviewer, Richard Adams, finds The World Is Flat to be a mere rewrite of Friedman’s earlier book, The Lexus and The Olive Tree, the style “grating,” and adds that the book “contains no surprises for anyone who hasn’t been locked in a cupboard for the past five years.” In contrast, Fareed Zakaria, reviewing the book in the NY Times, finds the metaphor of a flat world “ingenious,” and the style “accessible.”

Over at the Guardian, Caryl Phyllips reports on how he and Russell Banks climbled Mount Kilimanjaro earlier this year.

Russell and I first talked about this climb in Saratoga Springs during the 2004 summer programme of the New York State Writers Institute. One night, in a bar called The Parting Glass, we found ourselves bragging to each other, and the assembled writing students, about how we had both climbed Kilimanjaro. I had done so three times, and Russell once, but it was some time now since either of us had been on the mountain. Also, Russell had gone up the easier Marangu route, and over drinks I was trying to introduce him to the idea that the more difficult Machame route was the way to go. Predictably, by the time the barman called last orders we had talked ourselves into an expedition.

I read the article with a mixture of awe and dread. In one of my weaker moments, I promised Alex (an inveterate hiker/backpacker) that someday within the next ten years, I would hike up Kilimanjaro with him. We’re now three years into that promise, so I have some time yet, but I can’t imagine how I will do it–I can barely summon enough energy or excitement to do Mount Whitney. Besides, I find reading about the Kilimanjaro hike much more exciting.

Thanks to Randa for watching the site on Friday. I have a whole bunch of things to share with you this week: a great event held in Seattle, a book recommendation from a good friend, a guest column on writers’ rejection, and a sneak preview at a bunch of recent reads. Stick around.