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Ilan Stavans is not too impressed with Carlos Fuentes’s new novel, The Eagle’s Throne, as you can see from his Boston Globe review:

The fact that Fuentes’s place in the Mexican literary canon is often debated isn’t surprising. His output is at once prodigious and infuriatingly inconsistent. Maybe the problem is that his politics keep intruding. He writes fiction as if it were an op-ed piece. (…) Toward the end of the novel, Rosario Galván says, “I look back on the people, the places, the situations since the crisis began in January, and I find that there’s no sense of taste in my mouth. . . . My tongue and palate taste of nothing at all.” Regrettably, I sense the same tastelessness. Is this a novel? It reads like an opinion commentary. Not only is it hastily executed, but the attention to character is embarrassing. After reading several letters, it becomes clear that all were crafted by the same hand — Fuentes’s. And the busy plot looks to me like wasted talent.

You can read it all here. (You can use bugmenot for a free login.)

Terri Gross, the host of Fresh Air on NPR, interviews Israeli writer Etgar Keret (The Nimrod Flip-Out) and Palestinian writer and critic Samir El-Youssef about their perspectives on the war. You can listen online.

You may remember that Keret and El-Youssef co-authored a collection of stories called Gaza Blues. My favorite anecdote about this collaboration is one Keret told (I can’t find the reference; I think it was in a Nextbook interview a year ago, maybe) about a reading the two of them gave in Paris. After they had finished their reading, a woman raised her hand and said, “I’ve been listening to the two of you talk for the last hour, and I’m still confused: Which one of you is the Israeli? And which one the Palestinian?”

Related:
Article on Gaza Blues.
Gaza Blues review.
Keret and El-Youssef at Hay-on-Wye.

Thanks to Lauren B. for the NPR link.

John Freeman reviews Israeli novelist Sayed Kashua’s second novel, Let It Be Morning.

Until he returned to his home village from Tel Aviv, the unnamed narrator of Sayed Kashua’s second novel, “Let It Be Morning,” thought he understood [the predicament of Israeli Arabs]. But it turns out he only did so intellectually. As an Arab journalist working at an Israeli newspaper, he was able to enter the West Bank territories and talk to the grieving widows of “terrorists” who were killed in retribution for suicide violence. He wrote about their plight, as well as that of the victims of suicide bombings, trying to be fair. “I adopted the lingo of the military reporters: terrorists, attacks, terrorism, criminal acts,” he says, to keep his job. Ultimately, he got tired of having his copy scrutinized for Arab sympathies, so he returned home to work as a freelancer. “Somehow it seemed to me that if I lived in a place where everyone was like me,” he thinks, “things would be easier.”

And of course they’re not, which is why we have this novel, and why you really should read it. I will have more to say about it very soon.

Related:
Kashua devotes one of his regular columns in Ha’aretz to the war. He joins sixty other Israeli writers and artists in a petition against the war. The MG review of Kashua’s first novel, Dancing Arabs, is still available in the archives.

I had not heard about Beshara Doumani’s Academic Freedom After September 11, but Neve Gordon’s review in the Boston Globe certainly intrigued me.

Immediately after Sept. 11, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Lynne Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman, published a report accusing universities of being the weak link in the war against terror and a potential fifth column. As if the general hint at treason were not enough, an appendix to the report listed the names of more than 100 “un-American” professors, staff members, and students, and the offending statements they had made.

A few months after ACTA’s study was disseminated, Daniel Pipes, the director of a think tank called Middle East Forum, launched an Internet site called Campus Watch, which publishes dossiers on scholars who criticize US policy in the Middle East or Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. On the website, one finds a “Keep Us Informed” section, where Pipes encourages students to inform on any professor who deviates from “correct conduct.”

As Beshara Doumani, a University of California at Berkeley history professor, points out in his compelling introduction to “Academic Freedom After September 11,” Pipes and friends have cynically appropriated the liberal terminology of the New Deal and civil rights eras, employing code words such as balance, fairness, diversity, accountability, tolerance, and not least, academic freedom in order to justify the enforcement of a political orthodoxy that undermines these very values.

The book describes this new assault on academic freedom in detail, distinguishing the current wave from the one launched by Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Stanford University professor Joel Beinin observes, the geographical and political context has changed, so that if in the 1950s scholars who offered a dissenting analysis of the Soviet Union and Cold War were decried as traitors, today it is Middle East specialists who are being accused of treason.

But the main difference between the two situations is that today private interest groups and not the government are running the show.

Read it all here.

“Pointless now to study or revise. Impossible to work. Impossible to do anything except chafe and fret and fight with Lateefa who now wants her children to remain in the inner living-room of their flat and not even sit – with the windows closed – in the outer rooms where the walls could fall in on top of them at any moment. Dada Zeina cannot come any more. She has to stay in her own home and look after her own children. No shops are open to be sent to buy anything from. To go to the club would be unthinkable. Apart from the odd phone conversation with a friend, the world has been narrowed down to the inner living-room. Even novels are no good any more: Asya opens Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and closes them again. Out there, there is the world and action and history taking shape. And in here: waiting, helplessness – paralysis.”

Ahdaf Soueif, In The Eye of the Sun.