News

Paul Gray gives Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française a rave review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Suite was discovered in the 1990s by the author’s daughter, and turned out to be a novel of the Holocaust written during the horror that was unfolding.

The date of Némirovsky’s death induces disbelief. It means, it can only mean, that she wrote the exquisitely shaped and balanced fiction of “Suite Française” almost contemporaneously with the events that inspired them, and everyone knows such a thing cannot be done. In his astute cultural history, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” Paul Fussell describes the invariable progression — from the hastily reactive to the serenely reflective — of writings about catastrophes: “The significances belonging to fiction are attainable only as ‘diary’ or annals move toward the mode of memoir, for it is only the ex post facto view of an action that generates coherence or makes irony possible.”

Read the rest here.

A new book on Bernard-Henri Levy has stirred controversy in France for its virulent criticism of the open-shirted philosophe.

The book’s authors are sticking to their guns. ‘We tried to dissect what we call the “BHL system”,’ co-writer Olivier Toscer told The Observer last week. ‘We believe the media has created a myth that underpins who BHL is and what he does.’ Toscer, a journalist at a magazine in Paris, said Levy had become one of France’s ‘sacred cows’ who ‘it was no longer possible to criticise’.

Amusant. Sans plus.

The literary festival season will be starting soon and Simon Hoggart shares some of his experiences over at the Guardian.

Amazingly, real writers – not only hacks like me – seem willing to drop everything and speak at these places for, except rarely, no money at all. Quite a few festivals even jib about train fares and mileage (“we were rather hoping your publishers would fund your travel … “). My theory is that writing proper books is a lonely business, partly because unlike most jobs, it doesn’t provide much chance to meet others for the water cooler chat. (“God, he was the worst agent I’ve ever had.” “You don’t have to tell me!”) You might even sell a few books, though only if you’re famous.

More here.

If you’ve tried to buy a signed copy of my book over the last few weeks and failed, my apologies. Powell’s had sold out of them. I recently went into the store and signed some more copies of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. They’re now available here.

Oh, goodie: The latest issue of the New York Review of Books is now online, with articles on globalization, Hamas, the Web, and Michelangelo, among others. There’s also an essay by Christopher de Bellaigue, titled “Iran and the Bomb,” which starts:

During the past few months, many nations have reached a consensus on the threat that Iran’s nuclear program poses to international security. A similar consensus eluded the same nations in the debate over invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq three years ago. On March 8, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna referred Iran’s case to the Security Council. In public or private, but increasingly in public, senior officials from a wide range of countries—including the US, the EU states that vociferously opposed the invasion of Iraq, as well as India and Japan—speak of Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons with a conviction that suggests they regard it as an incontestable fact.

I’m going to go make a cup of coffee and come back to read it.