Month: February 2004

One of my favorite online mags, Words Without Borders, is featured in this New York Times article.

The idea took root well before Sept. 11, when [Alane] Mason heard from a group of German publishers, complaining as usual about the provincialism of Americans in the world of letters. She said she began to think about her own lack of knowledge of new writers from other countries, came up with the idea of an online magazine and applied for a grant.

The magazine’s Middle-East section is particularly worth your while.

Bookslut links to an article about Panos Karnezis in which he talks about his choice to write in English.

Apart from the commercial advantages of being able to sell English-language fiction worldwide, there are technical reasons, too, for Karnezis’ choice. “The Greek language is a bit like Spanish – more other, much more wordy. It’s common to have very long sentences. As a language, Greek is more dramatic. I try to bring the Greek experience – the bathos, the pathos – into English.”
Is there a tension, then, between the language and what Karnezis is writing about? “Yes, yes. It’s very interesting. You can explain a man’s macho attitude with one word in Greek. You can be much more specific. Here, you have to do it in a few sentences, which I find a great challenge. It’s like building a wall.”

For my part, I wrote in Arabic and French when I was a kid but English superseded those languages by the time I started college. When I wrote in Arabic I found it hard to keep up with the rhythm. Pick up any novel in Arabic and you’ll see that a sentence can run a page or two. I needed the finality of the period, perhaps because I had been already exposed to non-Arabic punctuation from a very early age. In French I wrote mostly poetry, long pieces that were meant to sound like Lamartine or Hugo and later like Baudelaire or Verlaine. I started learning English in high school and liked the mechanics of the language and soon I was reading almost everything I could get my hands on in English. Sometimes I even read French or Arab writers in translation. After a few years English became the language I think in. Sometimes when I talk to my mom my Arabic comes out garbled, like a translation of something I’m conceptualizing in English. (There’s fodder for you Sapir-Whorf people.) Some of my favorite writers are non-native speakers: Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad and more recently Ha Jin and I end up re-reading them almost every year. Sometimes I wonder if language choice affects the kinds of stories I’m writing or thinking about writing. I suppose the only way to find out is to switch back and see. I certainly plan on trying that someday.

Fred Kaplan asks whether spy novels are any good these days. I just started Absolute Friends, so I’ll save this article for the weekend.

I’m not familiar with Israeli author Etgar Keret, but this article intrigued me.

[Y]et the funny, talkative, self-deprecating literary star is the “ordinary” one in a family that is a microcosm of the country’s extremes. Keret’s elder brother is “a certified genius” and militant activist who formed Israel’s Legalise Marijuana movement, and fights police brutality and the building of the security wall through the West Bank. His sister, an ultra-Orthodox Jew with 10 children, campaigns against cars entering her area of Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Her beliefs forbid her from reading Keret’s sharp-edged fiction but the Hasidic books she has given him influence his writing with a universal, fable quality.

Keret’s books are read by very different segments of the Israeli and Palestinian populations, and his work is available in many translations. Still, he seems to rub some people the wrong way.

A.B. Yehoshua, the elder of Israeli literature, complains that Keret’s fiction is narrow and non-ideological. Keret says, “I think I’m very political.” But unlike the tribal definition of politics that states “You’re stupid and we know what you need”, he believes ambiguity is moral and small, human stories hold more truth than the big, certain narratives of his predecessors.

Keret’s latest book is a collection of stories, The Nimrod Flip-Out (not yet available on Amazon apparently) but you can get his best-selling collection, The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God.

Ana Menendez will be reading from Loving Che, her new novel, at Powell’s tonight, though unfortunately I won’t be able to go as I already had plans to go see this tonight.

I just found out my Pindeldyboz story has been selected by StorySouth as one of their Notable Online Short Stories 2003. I see several Zoe friends on the list, including Heather Fleming, Avital Gad-Cykman, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Wendy Vaizey, Alan C. Baird as well as other fine writers like Sefi Atta, Randa Jarrar, Antonya Nelson, etc. Pindeldyboz scored six nominations. Other journals with multiple nominations included Eclectica, Eyeshot, Fiction Warehouse, LGCR, LitPot, McSweeney’s and Spoiled Ink.