Month: February 2004

The Missouri Review has started its own blog: Inside the Missouri Review.

Am I the only one who can’t quite make sense of this Village Voice piece about Marcel Proust? It looks like a review of a recent translation of Proust’s A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur but there are two many em-dashes and bizarre changes in subjects with each new paragraph. Oh, and I guess there’s also a quickie review of a recent translation of C&eacuteleste Albaret’s biography of the man.

Ha’aretz has an article about small presses in Israel.

How is it that right in the middle of a recession new publishers are setting up shop? It turns out that small publishers who start out during an economic slump adapt to operating under such conditions. There are a few rules that help them to survive, the first of which is “do it yourself” – the publishers save money by working from home, and are usually the ones who edit and translate the texts, design the books and are also in charge of advertising and public relations.

Read the whole thing here.

The last survivor of the Bloomsbury Group, Frances Partridge, has passed away.

Born Frances Marshall, she became the lover of group member Ralph Partridge, who was married at the time to painter Dora Carrington, who in turn was in love with biographer Lytton Strachey. The gay Strachey was in love with the “hopelessly heterosexual” Ralph Partridge. All lived together for a time in a house in the country.

And you thought your love life was complicated.

Jessa reviews a few recent comics for the Washington Post, including Joe Sacco’s The Fixer. The one line bio made me smile, though: they could call a blog a “Web log” and still sound quaint, but they came off as a little more than anachronistic when they call it a “Web blog” (as opposed to, oh, I don’t know, a print blog?)

Ahmed Marzouki’s Tazmamart, Cellule 10 is a memoir of the eighteen years he spent in the infamous jail of Tazmamart, in Morocco. In 1971, Marzouki was a student officer at the Ecole Militaire d’Ahermoumou. He was taken, along with hundreds of other classmates, to the town of Skhirat for what he believed were military exercises, but later turned out to be a coup d’Etat, plotted by General Mohamed Medbouh and by the director of the school, Lieutenant-Colonel Mhamed Ababou.

The coup failed, and the entire student body was arrested, jailed, and sentenced to serve various terms in the military prison at Kenitra. Then, two years into their sentences, fifty-eight of the prisoners (some of whom, like Marzouki, not only didn’t know about the coup but didn’t even fire a single shot) were taken to a new prison that had been built for them: Tazmamart. They were to stay in solitary confinement for eighteen years. Only twenty-eight of them survived.

Marzouki struggled for years to understand the arbitrariness of his imprisonment, so it’s perhaps not surprising that this book is written not so much as the narrative of his years in jail but as a close examination of the facts of the case. The reader is given the names and biographies of each of the prisoners, the names and dispositions of the guards, the daily menu, the schedule devised by the prisoners, the constant (denied) requests for water or medicine.

Of course, this is all interesting but the book is somewhat lacking in two aspects. First, the chapter on the coup feels very distant and doesn’t go into what Marzouki saw. This is a missed opportunity to give us an eyewitness account that is different from the accepted, official narrative. The second shortcoming is that, although Marzouki’s fate was decided by an apparatus which was ultimately controlled by King Hassan, the king is curiously absent from the book. Still, Tazmamart, Cellule 10 is an important and necessary read.