Month: March 2007

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, in his capacity as National Security Adviser during the Carter administration, bears a fair share of the blame for what is happening in Afghanistan, has a new book out, called Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower. As the title suggests, it’s an analysis of American foreign policy under George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

In her review in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani calls the book “compelling” and says Brzezinski’s analysis of the last 20 years of foreign policy is “dispassionate” and “sobering.” She ends the review with a direct quote:

“Nothing could be worse for America, and eventually the world,” [Brzezinski] writes at the end of this unsparing volume, “than if American policy were universally viewed as arrogantly imperial in a postimperial age, mired in a colonial relapse in a postcolonial time, selfishly indifferent in the face of unprecedented global interdependence, and culturally self-righteous in a religiously diverse world. The crisis of American superpower would then become terminal.”

You can read the piece in full here.

The other day, I needed to track down a copy of Frantz Fanon’s classic The Wretched of the Earth for a project I’m working on. Given the book’s subject matter, and the fact that I am in a francophone country, I thought it would be simple enough. I was wrong.

Bookstore #1
Me: Good morning, could you tell me if you have Les damnés de la terre in stock?
Clerk: Les années de la terre?
Me: No, no. Damnés, you know, like damnation.
Clerk: No, we don’t have it.

Bookstore #2
Me: Good morning, could you tell me if you have the book by Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre in stock?
Clerk: How do you spell the author’s last name?
Me: F-
Clerk: As in Fatima?
Me: Yes. A-N-
Clerk: As in Nathalie?
Me: Uh, yes. O-N.
Clerk: Sorry, we don’t have it.

Bookstore #3
Me: Good morning, could you tell me if you have the book about colonization and decolonization, Les damnés de la terre, by Frantz Fanon, F-A-N-O-N?
Clerk: Our computers are down at the moment, but I will write down the author and title and call you back, all right?
Me: Thank you.
Clerk: Okay, so you want Les damnés de la terre by Frank Fanon?

I called the Institut Français, to see if they had it. The phone rang and rang, and no one picked up.

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.

(via.)

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.”)