News

I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw this: The New York Times Book Review devoted its weekend issue to fiction (!) in translation (!!). You can read reviews of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, Maryse Condé’s The Story of the Cannibal Woman, Aharon Appelfeld’s All Whom I Have Loved, and several other novels in translation.

I was particularly interested in Jascha Hoffman’s data (warning: pdf format) on fiction published around the world. It reveals that, of the 1.5 million books published around the world last year, 30% were originally written in English, even though only 6% of the world’s population speaks English as a first language. This hegemony is accompanied by quite a bit of insularity, with only 2.62% of books published in the United States having originally appeared in another language, compared with 25% for Spain and 23% for Iran.

Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Times unveiled its new book section. Some material has been moved online from the print version (e.g. the calendar) and some content will be web-only, such as Sarah Weinman’s crime fiction column, which will be followed by Ed Park on science fiction, Richard Rayner on paperbacks, and Sonja Bolle on children’s books.

>A mere ten days after the passing of Driss Chraibi, another literary giant has left us: Kurt Vonnegut has died. He was 84. Articles and obits have begun to pour in, including this one in the New York Times, by Dinitia Smith. It’s a sad, sad day.

Update: RoTR has a long list of Vonnegut links. Maud bids farewell.

Photo: Jill Krementz.

We were walking in the Marrakech medina last week when we came across this old movie theater, just a stone’s throw away from the historic Jamaa El Fna square. Such cinema houses are now a rarity in Morocco–most of them closed down in the last twenty years, due to the relentless competition from pirated films. According to this recent article on Magharebia, the number of movie theaters in Morocco has gone from 280 in 1980 to just 85 by the end of 2006. In addition:

Director Saad Charaib explains that when the government worked out the details of its policy to support film production ($3.5 million annually), it failed to create a parallel policy to expand the broadcasting and cinema operation sector. He says that the total number of cinema-goers in 2000 was 13 million, whereas now the figure has dropped to 5 million. In his view there are several reasons, but chief among them is piracy, which draws many Moroccans away from cinemas. They would rather buy a film for ten dirhams than pay 30 dirhams to watch it at the cinema.

I was talking to one of my uncles about this–he used to be a movie nut when I was a child, so I wanted his opinion. He said he couldn’t remember the last time he had been in a theater. And of course he missed seeing a movie on the big screen, but he also missed the social aspect of going out to the movies, and interacting with friends and acquaintances rather than staying cooped up at home, watching a pirated film whose quality is so bad you can’t even suspend disbelief long enough to lose yourself in the story. I was also struck by the name of the theater in the Marrakech medina. Maybe if there were more Edens right here, young men would not be looking for Edens elsewhere.

Thirty days after the foiled March 11 attacks, Moroccan police have tracked and neutralized 3 members of the same terrorist cell, which they say numbers up to 12 people. In a pursuit that started at 5 am in the Hay Al Farah neighborhood and ended not far from there at 4 pm, three suicide bombers blew themselves up, one policeman died of his wounds, and another was slightly injured. The bombers were allegedly companions of the March 11 bomber, Abdelfettah Raydi, and had been under police surveillance for some time. This morning’s papers all lead with the story, except for the pro-government paper Le Matin, which placed the news below the fold. No one I’ve talked to is entirely surprised, but everyone is extremely upset and terribly worried. There is also a lot of public support for the family of the police inspector who died in the line of duty.Llah yehfed w yester.

The latest issue of the New York Review of Books includes a lovely review by Sarah Kerr of Joan Didion’s We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. (This latest collection includes all Didion’s non-fiction books published between 1968 and 2003.) After quoting a brief passage from Run, River, Kerr comments on Didion’s rhythm and approach to detail:

Writing here seems to function like a kind of insurance, keeping the record for later, in case familiar things suddenly up and disappear. And notice a striking phrase: “There was the sense that…” Soon enough, declarations in this vein would become a signature move in Didion’s work as a journalist. Boldly, she would mix authority and impressionism, the objective-sounding “there was” with the far more elusive “sense”—a transient perception, usually attributable to one perceiving mind. And in so doing, she would come up against one of the key problems in American nonfiction prose in the last half-century. She herself would help to formulate the problem, in fact, and she has never stopped trying—not to solve it, for there may be no solution, but to stay in its challenging presence.

The problem is something like this: A writer writes from a point of view. This point of view is partly a factual matter of physical or social positioning (either she is inside or outside, close to the problem she is writing about or out on the periphery). Further, point of view implies the more abstract positioning of an attitude toward time (does she look to the past for orientation, or the future?). The writer can never totally transcend her point of view. She would be dishonest if she tried to deny it. So how can she stay true to it, while meeting her ethical duty to hazard larger truths about the world?

Read this excellent piece here.