Return To The Homeland
As of July 13, more than 500,000 Moroccans have returned to the kingdom for annual vacation from their places of residence in Europe. I wouldn’t want to be working the freeway toll booth, man.
As of July 13, more than 500,000 Moroccans have returned to the kingdom for annual vacation from their places of residence in Europe. I wouldn’t want to be working the freeway toll booth, man.
Over at Slate, April Bernard doesn’t spare the latest John Irving:
Incest, mutilation, orphans, wrestling, prose only a mother could love–yes, it’s another John Irving novel. And Until I Find You–full of the author’s characteristic storytelling drive, macabre imagination, and lumpy sentences–arrives with an added frisson: the pre-publication announcement of its autobiographical roots. Jack, the hero, is sexually handled and molested by older girls and women by the age of 10; he longs for a father who left before he was born; he joins the wrestling team at a New England prep school; his eventual fame is compromised by a sense of vacancy and abandonment and a search for sexual and personal security that eludes him. These basics will be familiar to readers of Irving’s earlier novels, so it is not surprising–though it is clearly meant to be titillating–to learn they are autobiographical in origin. In fact, one suspects that the PR release of this “confession” (and the news that, while he was writing the book, Irving did at last find out who his father was) is designed to forestall the criticism such a dreadful, though clearly heartfelt, mess like this deserves.
“Wright Morris published more than thirty books and won a National Book Award before he died in 1998, yet his work was never widely read and now seems–alas–in danger of slipping entirely from sight. The Works of Love was my introduction to Morris, and it remains my favorite among his novels,” Arvin says. “It is a strange novel, although strange in a manner that is not currently in fashion. Its protagonist, Will Brady, is a Midwesterner, gentle, quiet. He is lonely, but has little bitterness. The book has almost no plot–which usually I cannot bear in fiction, but in Morris’s beautiful, descriptive prose, as the novel drifts on the intense but curiously disengaged observations of Brady, it attains a unique power. Brady rarely knows quite what to make of the world around him or how to react to it, which has a tragic aspect, but it is also unexpectedly liberating, and it allows the novel to explore that extraordinary emotion–difficult to write about and often neglected in fiction–called wonder.”
Nick Arvin is the author of a collection of stories, In the Electric Eden, and a novel, Articles of War, which was published in February.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
Morocco Times: 10 Questions For JK Rowling.
Over at the Guardian, Robert McCrum wonders whether book reviews matter. He asks the question mostly from the point of view of authors: should they bother reading their reviews? And then trots out a few anecdotes.
The WSJ’s Vauhini Vara reports on publishers’ attempts to create fake websites and blogs to promote novels.