Month: November 2007
The December 10 issue of The Nation magazine is its annual Fall Books issue, so it’s a particular delight for those of us who like to read books, and read about them, too. There are pieces on Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal, Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, among many others.
The magazine also includes an essay of mine about the headscarf controversies in France. It’s called “Beyond the Veil.” Here is its opening paragraph:
“A kind of aggression.” “A successor to the Berlin Wall.” “A lever in the long power struggle between democratic values and fundamentalism.” “An insult to education.” “A terrorist operation.” These descriptions–by former French President Jacques Chirac; economist Jacques Attali; and philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann–do not refer to the next great menace to human civilization but rather to the Muslim woman’s headscarf, which covers the hair and neck, or, as it is known in France, the foulard islamique.
In her keenly observed book The Politics of the Veil, historian Joan Wallach Scott examines the particular French obsession with the foulard, which culminated in March 2004 with the adoption of a law that made it illegal for students to display any “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation. The law further specified that the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap and large crosses were not to be worn but that “medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, and small Korans” were permitted. Despite the multireligious contortions, it was very clear, of course, that the law was primarily aimed at Muslim schoolgirls.
The rest of the article is freely available online, here.
We are leaving for a week’s vacation in Hawaii tomorrow (in fact, I should probably be packing instead of blogging.) Last night, while choosing which books to take with me, I ended up pulling out Joan Didion’s essay “In The Islands,” which was published in her collection The White Album. The opening paragraph reads:
1969: I had better tell you where I am, and why. I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together. My husband is here, and our daughter, age three. She is blonde and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei, and she does not understand why she cannot go to the beach. She cannot go to the beach because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7.5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected. In two or three minutes the wave, if there is one, will hit Midway Island, and we are awaiting word from Midway. My husband watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water.
The bulletin, when it comes, is a distinct anticlimax: Midway reports no unusual wave action. My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby’s hair. In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.
Isn’t this the best of Didion, and the worst? The precise adjectives, the varied syntax, the parallel between natural and personal calamity–any writer would envy her those qualities. (I know I do.) And yet, the paragraph also has the worst of her, doesn’t it? Did you really need to know that she stays in a “high-ceilinged room” at the expensive Royal Hawaiian Hotel? The best and worst compete with each other for the rest of the essay, and yet of course I felt compelled to finish it, and read the best sentences out loud to my husband.
I have an essay titled “Why I Write,” in the Dutch literary magazine Nexus. I wrote this piece last spring in Casablanca, at the invitation of editor Rob Riemen, who wanted a piece on the subject of childhood dreams–you can easily guess what my dream was. The essay was translated into Dutch by Ineke van der Burg. I haven’t submitted the essay anywhere in the States yet (maybe if I stopped traveling so much…) but maybe someday the original English-language edition will appear somewhere. For those of you who read Dutch, the table of contents is available here, and you can purchase a copy here.
Words Without Borders, the wonderful organization that brings you literature in translation, recently started an online book club. I’ve linked before to the conversations: Mark Sarvas discussing Sándor Márai’s The Rebels and Michael Orthofer talking about Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins.
I mention all of this again because, next month, I will be doing the book club discussion on Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King, translated from the French by James Kirkup. If you’re interested, why not get the book at your local bookstore, or borrow it from your library? You have a couple of weeks before the conversation starts. I haven’t read the novel yet myself–I am taking it with me when I go on vacation later this week, and will savor it then. Once I have something up on the WWB website, I’ll mention it in this space as well, so you can take part in the conversation.