Laila Lalami

“I just finished reading Josip Novakovich’s wonderful novel April Fool’s Day,” Mandelbaum says. “It chronicles the life of one Ivan Dolinar, a Croatian whose knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time makes him a useful guide to that hauntingly perverse pocket of the world, the Balkans. Spanning fifty-plus recent years, the book naturally devotes some of its attention to war and its horrors (in a particularly chilling scene, Ivan comes across the crucified body of a Muslim friend from medical school), but the novel’s main focus is Ivan’s struggle for survival and a meaningful existence. Novakovich’s vision encompasses the broadly philosophical and the minutely sensory; his voice is inviting and compelling, morally alert without being moralistic, and he never loses sight of what makes for a good story.”

Paul Mandelbaum is the author of Garrett in Wedlock, part of which appears in the Winter issue of Glimmer Train Stories. He also edited the anthology First Words: Early Writings From Favorite Contemporary Authors, including juvenilia by Margaret Atwood, Rita Dove, Stephen King, Maxine Hong Kingston, John Updike and others.

Kitabkhana rounds up some of the reactions to Salman Rushdie’s visit to Kolkata (Calcutta) this week:

Rushdie, with quote marks
Looks like the man’s being mobbed on his Kolkata visit. He had fun: “In America, we have to deal with strange growths called Bushes.” And so did the press. In which Salman chacha reveals that he wants to write a book on Machiavelli, Padma Lakshmi says that his new book has “a lot on cooking“, and one news report does its best to put Rushdie’s life and works into perspective. Grimus was “a science fiction”, and Rushdie also wrote “The Moor’s Last Sight”. And the anonymous author serves up the most entertaining review of The Satanic Verses yet: “The novel was a story of two Indian actors who fell on the Earth after an Air India aircraft exploded mid air. The book criticised terrorism.”

Hurree also weighs in on that most important of all lit questions: Who is hotter, Salman Rushdie or Brad Pitt?

Subcommander Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista movement in Southern Mexico, is co-authoring a detective novel with best-selling crime writer Pablo Ignacio Taibo. NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro has the scoop. And the NY Times has a piece about it as well.

The first six chapters of the book, titled “Awkward Deaths,” are to be a sort of Ping-Pong game, Mr. Taibo said. Marcos is to write chapters one, three and five, introducing his detective, Elias Contreras. Mr. Taibo would write chapters two, four and six, using the protagonists in his previous books, Detective Hector Belascoaron Shayne. In the seventh chapter, the two detectives must meet at the Revolution Monument in Mexico City, where Pancho Villa and Lazaro Cardenas are buried.

An Azeri translation of Mein Kampf by a newspaper editor in Azerbaijan has infuriated Jewish groups there and resulted in the impounding of all unsold copies.

Azadliq newspaper said it had taken Mr Zeynalli more than two years to translate the book and that local press have been publishing it in fragments for the past two years.

But by publishing the book in full, Mr Zeynalli may have broken a national ban on Hitler’s anti-Semitic text.

Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union and took part in World War II against Nazi Germany.

on Tom Wolfe, for I Am Charlotte Simmons. According to the Reuters piece, Wolfe nabbed the award for this passage.

Slither slither slither slither went the tongue,” one of his winning sentences begins.

“But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns — oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest — no, the hand was cupping her entire right — Now!”

And what could be sexier than otorhinolaryngological caverns?

The Daily Star runs a profile of French sensation Faiza Guene, whose book Kiffe Kiffe Demain has already sold 70,000 copies so far.

The daughter of Algerian immigrants, Guene, a writer and aspiring filmmaker, grew up in Les Courtillieres, one of Paris’ large public housing projects in the northeastern suburbs. Her novel, “Kiffe kiffe demain (More of the Same Tomorrow),” recounts the life of a heroine named Doria. (The title loses a lot in the English translation – “Kif kif demain” would be the correct spelling but Guene changed it to reflect the verb “kiffer,” slang for liking something, so the title would have an upbeat connotation.) The book was published in August 2004. It was an instant hit.

The book is due to come out in the States with Harcourt in Spring 2006.

Related posts: 1 and 2.

Thanks to Jonathan for the link.

Jennifer Traig’s memoir of her troubles with OCD, Devil is in the Details was published earlier this fall, and garnered her some very good reviews. She’s taking over Mark Sarvas’ blog, The Elegant Variation for the day, as part of her virtual book tour. Be sure to stop by and read her posts.

Something to look forward to: Salman Rushdie is said to be working on a new book about Machiavelli, the Hindustan Times says. Rushdie was in Kolkata for a talk and book signing.

Link from TEV.

The controversy over whether Federico Garcia Lorca should be exhumed is still raging in Spain. The poet and playwright, who was shot dead in 1936, in the early days of Spain’s civil war, has come to symbolize General Franco’s faceless victims.

Part of the lore surrounding Garcia Lorca is that his burial place is a mystery. In fact, the family and most experts agree on the general location, a ravine in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada near the village of Viznar, about five miles from Granada. It was a killing field, historians say, littered with the corpses of hundreds of people.

In a sense, the family argues, the mass grave itself is a fitting monument, a place of natural beauty that bears witness to an awful chapter of repression and political murder.

But others maintain that it takes someone of Garcia Lorca’s stature to finally bring attention to Franco’s victims, the vast majority of whom were buried anonymously, their families left to decades of uncertainty and shame. By contrast, pro-Franco dead have been honored by memorials and statues paid for by a string of governments.

What’s it like being a writer in France? You starve (the way you would here, but there you do it on brie and baguette), you produce (at the rate of one book a year), people actually read your books (and you’ll get reviews). If you make it big (or are re-discovered after you’re dead), they bury you in the Pantheon and have headlines about how your loss leaves them in despair. Exaggeration? Only slightly.

Cristina Nehring’s NY Times piece, though, essentially states the fact that France is a nation of bibliophiles, but doesn’t go much beyond that. She picks a few titles from this year’s rentre litteraire, declares them “disconcertingly weak,” generalizes to the rest of current French fiction, and ends with a bit of shoulder shrugging.