Month: June 2008

The Guardian reports that this year’s IMPAC Dublin award has gone to Rawi Hage for De Niro’s Game:

A debut novelist writing in his third language has bested competitors including Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and Margaret Atwood to take the world’s richest literary prize. First-time author Rawi Hage was this morning declared the winner of the €100,000 Impac Dublin literary award for his novel De Niro’s Game.

De Niro’s Game is set during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s, its title alluding to the Russian roulette which features in the celebrated Vietnam film drama. In Hage’s novel, the private lives and morals of two young friends are pushed badly out of shape by the relentless stresses and brutality of the conflict raging around them. The judges’ citation, delivered at a ceremony in Dublin’s City Hall earlier, praised De Niro’s Game for its “originality, its power, its lyricism, as well as its humane appeal … the work of a major literary talent.”

The novel comes out in paperback with Harper in the summer.

Powell’s bookstore has come up with a really neat idea: an indie subscription club whose members get a package of new books every six weeks. The package might include a signed first edition, or a title from the author’s backlist, or an advance copy of a new title, but the coolest part about this is that you don’t know what you’ll get until the package arrives. This would make a great gift. (Hint, hint, Alex.)

I doubt if Ahmed Herzenni, the president of the Advisory Council on Human Rights (CCDH), who was visiting the United States to speak to the Moroccan community about his organization’s work, expected the reception he ended up getting in Washington, DC. The Moroccans in attendance asked him pointed questions about the kingdom’s appalling record on human rights, the lack of independence of the judiciary, the elections, and so on. A couple of the attendees got very upset. You can watch video segments from the meeting here. (Scroll on the right hand side to see all five videos.)

The Los Angeles Times Book Review has posted its summer 2008 reading list. Ordinarily, I’d be looking through it to see if there’s something interesting I’m missing, but this summer I’m trying to read older books for a change. At the moment, for instance, I am re-reading, for the first time in twenty years, Driss Chraibi’s Le Passé Simple. My God, I had forgotten how violent that novel is, in everything from action to language.

Zakes Mda has written a lovely piece for the Boston Review about his writing process, specifically his approach to realism and characterization. He discusses J.M. Coetzee’s incredible novel Waiting for the Barbarians, placing it in the context of apartheid-era South African fiction, which was often starkly realistic:

What others saw as a failure to represent lived experience appeared to me—I was then living in exile—as a refreshing way to re-imagine South Africa and transcend the repetition of the horrors reported every day in newspapers. Waiting for the Barbarians addressed the brutality of colonialism in a timeless manner and extended the borders of “empire” far beyond those of South Africa: to the rest of Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. Springing from the particular circumstances of South Africa, it spoke to a universe in which the state became increasingly terroristic in its defense of imperial values. The timelessness was rendered all the more striking to me when one of my students at Ohio University asked if the novel was written after 9/11.

He also describes how Coetzee’s attention to characterization helped him to see the need to create emotionally and intellectually complex South African characters:

In 1984 my play, The Road, won the Christina Crawford Award of what was then called the American Theater Association and was read on stage at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco. Theater educators and scouts gathered and offered their critiques. I was taken aback by one particular comment: according to one critic, the Afrikaner character was a thorough scoundrel without a single redeeming feature. (…)The play is highly allegorical, for allegory is the mode of oral literature and folklore in that part of the world. South African theater was allegorical long before Coetzee. Its humor was in its absurdity, which was largely the absurdity of the Afrikaner character and everything he stood for. So, what more did the San Francisco critic want from it? What redeeming attribute could an Afrikaner character possibly have, especially after oppressing me for more than three hundred years?

Of course, real people are never as sharply contrasted as some heroes and villains in fiction, and Mda had to learn to create more complex Afrikaner characters.

Related: On Zakes Mda’s novel Cion for The Nation .

The New York Times Book Review asked a few poets and novelists which books they would recommend for the three presidential candidates. I think my favorite suggestions are those given by Lorrie Moore:

For Obama: “The Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James. A virtuous orphan is plotted against by a charming, ruthless couple the orphan once trusted and admired.

For Clinton: “Macbeth,” by William Shakespeare. The timeless tale of how untethered ambition and early predictions may carry a large price tag.

For McCain: “Tales From the Brothers Grimm.” In case more are needed.

Meanwhile, Gore Vidal contributes a typically Vidalian recommendation: “I can only answer in the negative: I want them not to read The New York Times, while subscribing to The Financial Times.”