Month: July 2005

As has been widely reported, the Caine Prize for African writing has been awarded to the Nigerian S.A. Afolabi, who got to take home $15,000 and lots of media attention. I’m not at all familiar with Afolabi’s work, so I was rooting for the one nominee whose work I have read before: Doreen Baingana, whose excellent collection Tropical Fish, came out earlier this year. Here’s an article that talks about previous winners of the Caine Prize and the subsequent effect on their careers.

Observer critic Hephzibah Anderson files an article about literary blogs, name-checking Moorishgirl, adding:

These are not havens for kinky librarians but online reading journals – digital marginalia on books they’ve loved and loathed, supplemented by cut-and-paste montages of mainstream reviews. In tone, they offer the same abrasive mix of passion and gunslinging opinion that makes the political bloggers so refreshing.

However, Anderson’s unqualified mention of publishers “buying their way onto blogs with advertisements” deserves comment. Just to be clear: I don’t take ads and I don’t receive kickbacks for any books you see on review here. Nor do I plan to.

It’s been said before: The NY Times is almost singular in its ability to write about a trend long after it’s started, and then to do so it in such a way as to miss the most interesting indicators. Take, for example, their article: Dear Blog, Today I Worked On My Book, which is essentially a look at authors who blog. A worthwhile topic, to be sure, except that in the hands of the Times it turns into a look at seven blogs, five of which are maintained by non-fiction authors for whom the Internet is an integral part of their research. It’s a limiting approach, one that doesn’t represent the real diversity of what writers are doing with their blogs.

Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which I’ve praised on this blog and elsewhere, received another glowing review, this time from Stacey D’Erasmo in the Sunday NY Times:

The style that Urrea has adopted to tell Teresita’s — and Mexico’s — story partakes of this politics as well, being simultaneously dreamy, telegraphic and quietly lyrical. Like a vast mural, the book displays a huge cast of workers, whores, cowboys, rich men, bandits and saints while simultaneously making them seem to float on the page. Urrea’s sentences are simple, short and muscular; he mixes low humor with metaphysics, bodily functions with deep and mysterious stirrings of the soul. These 500 pages — though they could have been fewer — slip past effortlessly, with the amber glow of slides in a magic lantern, each one a tableau of the progress of earthy grace: Teresita crouched in the dirt praying over the souls of ants, Teresita having a vision of God’s messenger not as the fabled white dove but as an indigenous hummingbird, Teresita plucking lice from the hair of a battered Indian orphan in a ‘pus-shellacked jacket.’

D’Erasmo raises a good point. My only quibble with the novel is that it could have been perhaps 50 pages shorter. But that’s an easily forgiveable misstep, since Urrea writes so beautifully I found myself breathless at some of his sentences.