Laila Lalami

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.

Iraqi novelist Alia Mamdouh has won the 2004 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for literature for The Loved Ones, first published by Saqi Books in 2003. The Loved Ones is due out in translation in 2005 but one of Mamdouh’s earlier novels, Mothballs, is available online.

Antony Beevor, Ali Smith, David Almond, Ian Rankin, and Margaret Atwood reflect on their first books. My favorite is probably Margaret Atwood’s piece about how she “published” her first collection of poems, at the tender age of 21. The book was printed in a cellar, and Atwood herself set the type, though she had to do each poem separately because there was a shortage of letter As.

Then how did I get the nerve? I actually went around to various bookstores and got them to place the book. Bookstores were different then: small, individually owned, run by kindly gnomes with a tolerance for eccentricity. They must have thought that I was a fool or a lunatic, or in the Toronto parlance of the day different, but this did not seem to bother them. As the book was small, it sold for 50 cents. I should have kept 249 of the things, as the price has now gone up considerably.

The title of this tiny but peculiar effort was Double Persephone; the poems rhymed and scanned, and were about sex and death, with some rebirth tossed in: my optimism was showing early. As I recall, the word chthonic was in them, so it was pretty deep stuff.

What do I think of them now? They weren’t very good, but at least they were oh, killing term promising. I’ve been cheered up since by reading the juvenilia of other poets whose mature work I admire: Tennyson, for instance, has one that begins, ‘Airy, fairy Lilian’.

Best advice for young writers? This is a risky business. You’re on a tightrope. Below is Niagara Falls. Courage. One step at a time. Don’t look down.

The others are also quite good. Do take a look.

William Dalrymple reviews Gilles Kepel’s The War for Muslim Minds.

Reading Gilles Kepel’s important book, it is easy to see why al-Qaida should be so enthusiastic about Bush. Bin Laden has always been open about his aims: by unleashing a clash of civilisations between Islam and the “Zionist-Crusaders” of the west, he hopes to provoke an American backlash strong enough to radicalise the Muslim world, topple pro-western governments and so install a new Islamic caliphate.

Bush has fulfilled Bin Laden’s every hope. Through the invasion of secular Ba’athist Iraq, the abuses in Abu Ghraib, the mass-murders in Faluja, America, with Britain’s obedient assistance, has turned Iraq into a jihadist playground while alienating all moderate Muslim opinion. We may have failed to capture Bin Laden, but we have succeeded in liberating the extremists, radicalising the unaffiliated and making life more difficult than ever for our natural allies: ordinary, decent, moderate Muslims.

Essential reading.

I’m a big fan of the Guardian‘s profiles, because I almost always discover an unsual tidbit of information about the authors they pick. This week, Aida Edemariam profiles Annie Proulx, and I found her take on ‘write what you know’ quite refreshing.

The top floor of her house is filled with books, yet she only keeps those she likes. “It’s very hard to mention a book she has not read,” says Jenkins. She believes the best way to learn to write is to read – her own extensive and ever-changing list includes Thomas Mann, Patrick White, JF Powers, Haldor Laxness, Milorad Pavic, Flann O’Brien; she famously scorns that well-worn dictum, to write what you know. All it produces, she has said, is “tiresome middle-class novels of people who I think are writing about things they know, but you wish to God they didn’t. My thing is, learn what you want to write about. Find out about it.”

That, and I like a woman who built her own house.

That’s it for me this week. The one and only Randa Jarrar guest blogs tomorrow and every Friday. Have a great weekend.

Egyptian author, doctor, and activist Nawal El Saadawi has announced she will run in next year’s presidential elections in Egypt.

She told AFP news agency she did not expect to win, but wanted to get the Egyptian people “moving” to vote on important issues facing the country.

If the 73-year-old’s candidacy goes forward, she would be the first woman to run for the presidency.

This is more of a symbolic move, of course, since, according to the article, the Egyptian constitution requires that a candidate be nominated by Parliament before being submitted to a referendum.

Link via TEV.

PEN has announced the launch of a New York Festival of International Literature, which is to take place April 16 – 22, 2005 (no link yet). The week-long gathering will be an occasion to introduce or further acquaint American audiences with the finest international writers, including Adonis, Margaret Atwood, Breyten Breytenbach, Nuruddin Farah, Vaclav Havel, Michael Ondaatje, Wole Soyinka, Adam Zagajewski, and Salman Rushdie. They will be joined by U.S. resident authors like Chinua Achebe, Paul Auster, T.C. Boyle, Peter Carey, Edwidge Danticat, E. L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Gish Jen, Oscar Hijuelos, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, and Amy Tan. Part of the motivation for the festival is this:

There is also a shocking scarcity of international writing published here (less than 5% of literary titles compared to upwards of 50% in other developed countries). The lack of foreign writing, perhaps most of all, contributes to an alarmingly narrow American perspective on much of the rest of the world.

There will be readings, workshops, and performances for the festival, which is being billed as PEN World Voices.

The mention of Adonis and Chinua Achebe is enough to give me heart palpitations. If you live in New York, you lucky bastards, make sure you go. I’ll keep a close eye on this one and post links when they become available.

(Thanks to Wah-Ming Chang for the info.)

NPR’s Noah Adams talks to Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o about the importance of creating literature in under-represented languages. Ngugi’s perspective is interesting, particularly because he started writing in English first (as ‘James Ngugi’) and eventually turned to writing in his own language, Gikuyu. He made the decision while serving time in jail over a play he’d written. Here’s a quote (approx. 2:50 mn):

If you’re an African intellectual, you can do for your language what all other intellectuals have done for their languages. Through translation, the Gikuyu language can talk with English, or with Japanese, or with Swedish. But the situation…for African people is that they are expected to give up their language altogether and operate in another language.

The title of the NPR piece, though, “Creating Literature in Native Languages” itself presumes the dominance of one culture/language over others. I mean, aren’t all languages ‘native’ to the people born to them? Shouldn’t it be something like “Creating Literature in Your Languages”?

Mormon author Grant H. Palmer, whose book, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins, challenges the received dogma of his faith, has been summoned by the Church of Latter-Day Saints for a disciplinary hearing and faces “possible excommunication for apostasy.” Palmer’s “crimes” are thus:

[Palmer's book] challenges the traditional explanations of the faith’s founding events – Joseph Smith’s First Vision, the visit of the Angel Moroni, Smith’s translation of ancient writings on gold plates and the restoration of the priesthood.

Palmer argues that Smith never translated anything, that the Book of Mormon reflects Smith’s own 19th century milieu, not ancient America, and that Smith, considered by the faithful to be their prophet, revised the story of his visions many times to solve church disputes as they arose.

This is not the first time that the LDS Church has censured authors for their books. In 1993, six Mormon intellectuals were sanctioned for their views on feminism, church policies and history.