This is great. The new Words Without Borders anthology is out, and it’s called The World Through The Eyes of Writers. It includes contributions by Ma Jian, Adania Shibli, Gamal Al-Ghitani, and introductions by Jonathan Safran Foer, Anton Shammas, and Naguib Mahfouz, among many, many others. I was delighted to see my friend Randa Jarrar had done some translation work for them, with a piece by Iraqi writer Jabbar Yassin Hussein. Check it out.
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This weekend I tried reading Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack, translated by John Cullen. Khadra, you may recall, is the pseudonym of Algerian novelist (and ex army officer) Mohamed Moulessehoul. While his earlier work was set in his native Algeria, The Swallows of Kabul was set in Afghanistan, The Attack is set in Israel, and his latest, The Sirens of Baghdad, is set in Iraq. (By the way, do you think his next one will be set in Iran? With a title like The Sparrows of Tehran?)
The Attack is about a successful Arab Israeli surgeon named Amin Jaafari who works to save the many victims of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, only to discover that his wife Sihem was behind the terrorist attack. Let’s just say I couldn’t get very far into the novel. I thought it relied too much on cliché both in terms of character development, and in terms of the language itself (e.g., “The eyes in [a sheikh] ascetic’s face glinted like the blade of a scimitar.”)
I’ve been invited by the Moroccan American Circle to do a reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. The event will take place tonight at the Churchill Club here in Casablanca. Details:
7:00 PM – 10:30 PM
Reading & Discussion to be followed by drinks and tapas
Churchill Club
1 rue de la Méditerannée
Aïn Diab, Casablanca
(Admission 100dh)
(The reading and discussion will be in English. ) Hope to see you there!