A Poet Silenced
Abdallah Al-Ryami, an Omani poet and playwright, was jailed last week for “criticizing human rights violations” in his country. Reporters Sans Frontieres has a little background on the case.
Abdallah Al-Ryami, an Omani poet and playwright, was jailed last week for “criticizing human rights violations” in his country. Reporters Sans Frontieres has a little background on the case.
A longish profile of Dave Eggers appears in the FT this weekend, and I only link to it because it contains a few amusing, semi-sarcastic observations, like this one:
He is part of that American tradition where being a successful author isn’t quite enough. You have to be a whole home entertainment system.
An exhibit of Botero’s paintings, inspired by the torture of Iraqi prisoner by U.S. troops at the Abu-Ghraib prison, opened in Rome last month. Another show of the artist’s works opened in Barranquilla, this time displaying pieces inspired by car bombings and kidnappings in Colombia. The L.A. Times has a review of the shows, and of what drew Botero to the events.
These aren’t the sorts of scenes most people associate with Fernando Botero. For decades, the 73-year-old Colombian painter and sculptor has been best known for his seemingly innocuous images of plump priests, chunky children and still lifes of gargantuan fruits and flowers.
But this perception of Botero’s work was always overly simplistic and incomplete. Encoded, or perhaps hidden in plain sight, in many of his paintings are multilayered cultural symbols, covert allusions to current events and winking art-historical references to works by Velazquez, Vermeer and other Old Masters. Some of his most enigmatic images birds perched in lollipop trees, faces anxiously peering out of windows, a pile of dead bishops resting peacefully hint at darker forces roiling beneath the colorful, pleasing surfaces.
Read more here.
Of the books I read, I review very few on my blog, so since it’s a Friday and I’m procrastinating, I thought I’d post a little bit about what I’ve read lately.
I just finished Nedjma’s The Almond, which I thought was bloody awful. It had almost no character development, and the plot was fairly uninspired. The erotic part was well-written, though, if you’re into that sort of thing, but even that sank into problems of its own.
I did, however, enjoy War by Candlelight, Daniel Alarcon’s debut collection, which is set mostly in and around Lima. In his writing, the city is treated as a character and I thought that was beautifully done.
I’m nearly finished with Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. It’s set during the Gulf war, and it features a wide range of characters who all inhabit the same art-deco building in Cairo. It’s a light, fun read, with occasional eyebrow-raising comments (about women, sex, and gays) that are left to the reader to interpret. I’ll probably have more to say about it in a couple of weeks.
I just started Kevin Smokler’s anthology Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, which features essays by Adam Johnson, Meghan Daum, Tom Bissell, and Nell Freudenberger, among others. Smokler was in Portland yesterday for a reading, and he shared some thought-provoking observations about books and the state of reading today.
I know I’ve mentioned this book before several times, and I will mention it again: I loved Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion, which is set in 1899 in Zanzibar, and tracks the consequences of a forbidden love affair across three generations. I found it beautifully written, incredibly compelling, and profoundly relevant. It comes out this month, and I really urge you to read it.
Lord helps us. Another review of The Almond, and another reviewer who doesn’t get it. Here’s an example:
Nedjma writes in painstaking – and often painful – detail about Islamic customs regarding marriage and sexual practices. “No, I didn’t love Hmed, but I did think he’d be of use to me, at least – he’d make a woman of me. Free me and cover me with gold and kisses,” Badra says of her husband. Then: “All he managed to do was deprive me of my laughter.”
The book tells the story of one woman from Imchouk, one woman who goes to Tangier and takes a lover. How the hell do you go from that to “Islamic customs”? What the hell are Islamic customs anyway? Bosnian? Malaysian? Chinese? French? What?
Well this should be interesting. Mark Sarvas, who’s been doing the L.A. Times Book Review Thumbnail on his blog, The Elegant Variation, will be on an open source radio show with Steve Wasserman, outgoing editor of the review. Kevin Smokler will also be a guest, so it should make for a very interesting show. You can stream it live here at 4 pm Pacific time.
Or you can listen to Bookworm on KCRW, where Michael Silverblatt will be hosting a show on Asian identity in writing, with guests Don Lee, Susan Choi, and Maxine Hong Kingston. You can stream it live here at 2:30 pm Pacific time.