I have been following my good friend Mark Sarvas‘s progress as he wrote his novel, revised it, polished it, found an agent, and went into the submission process. And I am thrilled to share with you the happy news that he has just sold his novel, Harry, Revised to Bloomsbury. Having read the book a couple of months ago, I can tell you you’re in for a treat. Congratulations are in order!
With all the commotion of the last few weeks, I completely failed to notice that Sherman Alexie had a new novel coming out. It’s his first in ten years, it’s called Flight, and it sounds trippy. Here’s the publisher’s description:
[A] powerful, fast and timely story of a troubled foster teenager — a boy who is not a “legal” Indian because he was never claimed by his father — who learns the true meaning of terror. About to commit a devastating act, the young man finds himself shot back through time on a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He resurfaces in the form of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, inhabits the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Big Horn, and then rides with an Indian tracker in the 19th Century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. When finally, blessedly, our young warrior comes to rest again in his own contemporary body, he is mightily transformed by all he’s seen.
The book comes out March 28, and you can already see the PW review here.
At the time I was writing Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, that is, between the spring of 2002 and the winter of 2004, I had not visited Tangier in more than fifteen years. I had spent several summers in the city as a child and teenager, and, perhaps presumptuously, I felt I still knew the place well enough to be able to describe it in a decent way. I wrote about streets and buildings and cafés, but I was working essentially from memory.
While in Tangier this past weekend, I decided to visit some of the places I wrote about in the book. I walked through the Gran Socco and the Socco Chico, and it was interesting to see how much they had changed (many of the historic buildings have been renovated), and also how little (there are still plenty of tourist guides, kif smokers, and vendors in sombreros.) The talk of the town was the city’s candidacy to host the 2012 World’s Fair. The train station has been moved to a new location, and the port now includes a free trade zone. Tangier felt like a city in motion, just as I remembered it.
In “Better Luck Tomorrow,” my character Murad spends time in a Café la Liberté, which was a fictional place, but as I was walking down one of the streets that led to the socco, I discovered there really was a Café La Liberté. I sat down for a cup of coffee there, and there really was a football match playing on the screen, and deals being made at the tables.
In the story, Murad meets some tourists who are curious to find the famous Café Central, so of course I went there as well. It has been nicely renovated, and the outside tables were packed. I took a photo of the Pension Fuentes that sits across the lane. I walked into one of the antique shops where the action in “The Storyteller” takes place. I felt like I had stepped, once again since writing it, into my own book.
Regular readers of this blog may be familiar with photographer Yto Barrada’s work, which I have mentioned on several occasions. I finally had the chance to meet her in person this past weekend, when I traveled to Tangier to attend the opening of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, a project that Barrada has been working on for several years. Barrada bought the old Cinéma Rif, which is located on the historic Gran Socco plaza, in 2001 and, after years of planning and fund-raising, closed it down in 2004 for renovations. The Cinéma Rif has now reopened, and has been completely modernized, with new seats, new screen, new projection equipment, but all the charm of the original metalwork on the box office window, the original lamps in the café area, the movie posters–and the same staff. In addition to the main theatre, Barrada also conceived of the place as a cinematheque, and has added a small theatre, which will be used for retrospectives as well as workshops, a library, a videotheque, and an editing room. (You can view many candid photos of the opening, and of other CDT activities, here.)
Barrada chose to inaugurate the new Cinéma Rif with the work of a Moroccan filmmaker, the lovely and amazing Farida Benlyazid, whose latest film, Juanita de Tanger, has been making the festival rounds. (The picture is based on the novel by Angel Vasquez, La Vida Perra de Juanita Narboni.) Benlyazid was quite emotional when she took the stage: She remembered coming to the then-dilapidated theater to watch Abdel Halim films back in the sixties, and she spoke of what this new theater will mean for her hometown. In the audience was another original patron of the place–Tahar Ben Jelloun. It was a Tangerine evening.
I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, picking up different essays at different moments, depending on my mood. This morning, I finally read the opening piece, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Didion writes about the death of a dentist named Gordon Miller, a Seventh-Day Adventist from San Bernardino County, California, and the subsequent trial of his wife, Lucille Maxwell, for his murder. Didion begins the piece not with an examination of the tabloid trial, but with a reflection about dreams–of love, of wealth, of happily ever after–in a part of California where “it was easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book.” And then she writes, “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
Why do I have the feeling that her words could just as easily apply to Morocco? It’s interesting to me that foreign journalists, those who visit the place on assignment, love to play up the fact that this is an “ancient” country, with its millennial history, its customs, and its religions. And yet it’s hard to escape the future here. This is, after all, a place where historical sites are discarded in favor of shiny new developments, where everyone keeps talking about that new government plan or that five- or ten-year initiative, the strategies that will finally end poverty, eradicate illiteracy, and bring democracy and financial prosperity. It’s all in the future. How many remember that those things were said thirty years ago?