I had bought a copy of Hisham Matar’s In The Country of Men when I was in London last summer, and finally got around to reading it…last week. I enjoyed it quite a bit–it builds slowly in intensity, and deals with a terrible subject with a lot of grace and restraint. It looks like it just came out in the States: Ron Charles reviews it for The Washington Post.
Apologies for the lack of posts this past week. I’ve been struggling with a sore throat and an injured back. The latter is not such a bad thing; I tend to work with my laptop on my knees, and if I hurt my back it means I’m probably getting at least some work done. See? The glass is half full.
Daniel Alarcón, whose novel Lost City Radio comes out next month, is interviewed by Daniel Olivas over at TEV.
DANIEL OLIVAS: Why did you decide to set your novel in an unnamed South American country? Why not place it specifically in Peru?
DANIEL ALARCÓN: In writing this novel, I didn’t want to feel restricted in any way by the history, geography, or social landscape of Peru. It wasn’t my intention to be coy: I’m Peruvian, the general arc of the war as it unfolds in the novel is similar to that of the Peruvian conflict, and everyone will be able to recognize this. Still, the more I’ve traveled, the more places I’ve seen and people I’ve talked to, the more it has become clear to me that the forces shaping the future of a city like Lima are at work in developing countries all over the planet. When I was on tour last, for War by Candlelight, I always found myself saying, “If Peru was an invented country, and Lima an invented city, many people would still recognize it,” and I guess I sort of followed my own advice.
You can read the rest of this, and other answers, here.
Brian Sholis has started a cool little blog where he shares writers’ correspondence: Today in Letters. Samples: A letter from Paul Bowles to his editor Daniel Halpern, or one from Henry James to William Dean Howells.
The hard-working Chris Abani has a new novel out, The Virgin of Flames, which is about a biracial mural artist looking for himself in Los Angeles. Writing in the L.A. Times, Rubén Martinez finds that
All of this makes for a strange tension, a dissonance between simplistic dichotomies and the ambiguous renderings that Abani wants to paint for us in much the same way that Black paints his post-colonial, post-Sept. 11 Madonna. At times, Black comes across as the New Angeleno Man, a being of diffuse identity imbued not with superficial multiculturalism but with a more human wistfulness. “With an Igbo father and Salvadoran mother,” Abani writes, “Black never felt he was much of either. It was a curious feeling, like being a bird, he thought, swaying on a wire somewhere, breaking for the sky when night and rain came, except for him it never felt like flight, more like falling; falling and drowning in cold, cold water. When he felt the water rise, he would morph.” (…) Ultimately, “The Virgin of Flames” cannot fulfill the massive task of representing the transformation of Los Angeles into the astonishing and troubled amalgam of peoples it has become. Nor is this necessarily Abani’s goal; he is, after all, concerned as much with Black’s psychic landscape as with the social geography of L.A. How the novel is read, I suspect, will have much to do with readers’ places in the city, their relationships with whoever their “others” happen to be.
Meanwhile, Karen Olsson, who reviews the book for the New York Times, says:
Just as Black combines racist jokes and lines from Wallace Stevens in a work entitled “American Gothic — The Remix,” so Abani imagines a place that is horrifying and tender and absurd in equal measure. But with its uneven tone and meandering story, the book doesn’t quite hold together. The language veers from portentous to reportorial, and sometimes falls flat, as in a dull first-date scene between Black and Sweet Girl. As a result the final conflagration carries less impact than it might have.
Still, these are the missteps of an ambitious writer with an original perspective. In “The Virgin of Flames” he audaciously stakes his claim on a city not his own. And wisely, he doesn’t so much try to reveal its hidden side as to give it a costume, or a paint job, of his own making.
I have to say I am very intrigued as to what Abani will make of Los Angeles, and I want to read his book.