There’s obviously lots and lots of coverage of Orhan Pamuk now that he has won the Nobel Prize for literature. You can read Robert McCrum’s anecdote of meeting the then “unknown Turkish novelist” in 1991. Or the interview with Malcolm Jones in Newsweek, where Pamuk describes his development as a writer. Or his reaction to the new French law that makes it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide.
The October 16 issue of the New Yorker has a profile by Jane Kramer of Aboubakr Jamaï, founder, publisher, and editor of the Casablanca-based weekly magazine Le Journal Hebdo. The article is unfortunately not available online, so I can’t link to it. You should check it out, though. It’s generally well researched and quite readable, and gives a good background on Jamaï (or Boubker, as he is known.) Boubker’s magazine has created waves in Morocco for its daring reporting on the three taboos of the press (the king’s private life, Western Sahara, and separation of church and state). His work has cost him several trips to the courthouse, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The quote in the title of this post is from an unnamed source in Kramer’s article who says, “I tell Boubker, ‘Your editorials about the King are like Mercurochrome on a wooden leg.'”
Although I enjoyed the article, I had a couple of problems with it. For starters, the title is “The Crusader.” (I mean, seriously, what was the editor thinking?) And then Kramer adds occasional orientalist comments like: “The King at forty-three is not a statesman, despite a French education.” (Excuse me? So in order to be a statesman one needs a French education?) And when she mentions the women’s rights reform that took place in 2004, she states that Islamists staged a huge demonstration against it in Casablanca, but neglects to add that there was a demonstration in Rabat in favor of the reform. The effect is that one gets the impression that the only political actors on the scene are the king and the Islamists, which is not quite the case.
Tonight I’ll be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits at Powell’s City of Books in Portland. Here are the details:
Friday, October 13
7:30 PM
Reading and Signing
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W Burnside
Portland, Oregon
If your book club is reading Hope, you may find it relevant that Harcourt has a reading guide online.
Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, who directed The Battle of Algiers, has passed on, aged 86. The photo below is from the scene in which Colonel Mathieu enters the city with his troops, in order to quell the rebellion. (In real life, the actor Jean Martin staunchly opposed French occupation of Algeria. )
Below is another photo from the film, from a scene where four independence militants are trapped in the casbah. All the actors in the film, with the exception of Martin, were non-professionals.
When it was released in 1965, the film was banned in France, and several theatres that showed it in Europe were bombed. But the film survived, of course, and has become a classic. Last year, the Criteron Collection released a boxed set of the film, which includes many extras and commentary, by the likes of Mira Nair, Spike Lee, and Julian Schnabel. Pontecorvo will be sorely missed, and I can only hope that the rumors of a Hollywood remake are false.
This week is Fall Fiction Week over at Slate. There’s a great exchange between Gary Shteyngart and Walter Kirn on the future of American fiction, reviews of new books by Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Edna O’Brien, Richard Powers, Lynne Tillman, and Charles Frazier, and a survey of overlooked fiction by bloggers and booksellers. Find out which book I recommended.