News

The Winter 2006 issue of Ms. Magazine has a review of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.

This week, the LBC unveiled its winter Read This! selection, choosing Kristin Allio’s Garner. I’d like to give away a copy of this terrific book to a Moorishgirl reader. The third person (why third? why not?) to correctly answer this question wins the book: Which publisher released the novel? Please use the subject line “Garner” in your email, and please also include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded. And, while you’re at the LBC site, do check out the other nominations, which are announced all this week.

Update: The winner is Sarah R., from Gastonia, North Carolina.

Salman Rushdie was in Berlin to promote his new novel, Shalimar the Clown. The Daily Star has excerpts of an interview he gave to the German magazine Stern.

When asked if the book drew a link between “Islamic terror and damaged male honor,” Rushdie said he saw it as a crucial, and often overlooked, point. “The Western-Christian world view deals with the issues of guilt and salvation, a concept that is completely unimportant in the East because there is no original sin and no savior,” the author said, in comments printed in German.

“Instead, great importance is given to ‘honor.’ I consider that to be problematic. But of course it is underestimated how many Islamists consciously or unconsciously attempt to restore lost honor.”

This is a theme he’s explored at length in Shalimar. You can read my take on it here.

Over at the Guardian, Catherine Gander praises Ang Lee’s interpretation of the short story “Brokeback Mountain,” while bemoaning the “lost art of the narrative.”

Proulx’s tale, written in brisk yet highly evocative prose, relies on simplicity of plot to transcend the limitations of language, deftly yoking the wordless mythology of the cowboy with the understated love of her protagonists. That Proulx’s story had gone unnoticed here until the advent of Lee’s film is depressing yet unsurprising. The film raises an issue so far overlooked: England’s lost art of pure storytelling.

Gander argues that the short story is “nearly dead” in England because it is mismarketed as “bite-size literature” and that things are much better off in the US. Are they really?

Oprah’s newest book club selection, Elie Wiesel’s Night, has stirred up the debate over what exactly qualifies as memoir. In the New York Times, Edward Wyatt reports that the new edition corrects some factual errors in the book, though it’s unclear exactly what’s been corrected. Everyone associated with the book calls it a memoir.

“Some minor mistakes crept into the original translation that were expunged in the new translation,” Mr. Seroy said. “But the book stands as a record of fact.”

The publisher might itself have contributed to some of the debate. A teacher’s guide to the book posted on both the publisher’s Web site (www.nightthebook.com) and Ms. Winfrey’s site (www.oprah.com) says the book is “only slightly variant from Wiesel’s own personal and familial history.”

Mr. Seroy said the guide had been prepared for the previous translation, by Stella Rodway. He said that Farrar, Straus didn’t change the teacher’s guide because it feared that taking the statement out might raise questions about whether the publisher was trying to cover up any changes.

The problem this time, however, might not lie in the classification of the book as with the credibility of its author. Adam Shatz, literary editor for The Nation magazine, argues in an op-ed piece that

[T]here’s no denying the truth of Wiesel’s experience. But he has his own problems with credibility, which Winfrey might wish to note. Not with the facts of his own life but with broader issues of historical truth and historical memory, which touch upon matters far more substantial than the number of hours James Frey spent behind bars.

For example, Wiesel does not believe that Gypsies and gays should be remembered alongside Jewish victims of the Holocaust, although hundreds of thousands of them perished. He has frowned upon the use of the term “genocide” in reference to the Armenian holocaust.

Wiesel’s troubles with memory and truth are especially acute when it comes to Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians. For example, he has long maintained that the 1948 Palestinian refugees left voluntarily, “incited by their leaders,” a claim that Israel’s own historians have done much to shatter.

Oprah will host a discussion with Elie Wiesel on her show next month.

Thanks to Matt for the LA Times link.