News
The phenomenal success of Andrea Levy’s Small Island continues to garner her more attention, like this AP piece.
“When I started out, I was seen as a sort of marginal voice; the attitude was that only black people would read the books,” Levy says during an interview at the comfortable Edwardian house in north London she shares with her husband, a graphic designer.
“It was very hard, because I was writing something a little bit different, in that I was just writing about family, small stories. At that time, the prevailing trend was more sort of guns and drugs and stuff, and so they didn’t quite know what to do with me. They didn’t think there’d be a market for it.”
That impression has been exploded by several blockbuster novels exploring Britain’s – and especially London’s – rich multicultural history. Zadie Smith’s 2000 bestseller, “White Teeth” – an expansive saga that found room for Muslim fundamentalists, anarchists and Jehovah’s Witnesses – has sold more than 1 million copies and been turned into a British TV series.
Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane,” the story of Bangladeshi immigrants in London’s East End, was nominated for the 2003 Booker Prize and topped bestseller lists.
“I think that, as always happens, publishers get taken by surprise,” Levy says, “and things that they didn’t think would take off do.”
Just once I wish the reporter assigned to Levy wouldn’t make the comparison with Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. (One wonders why those comparisons were not made on the publication of Levy’s previous novel, or, for that matter, why Smith and Ali weren’t compared to Levy, who’s been writing and publishing for far longer.) And while I’m at it, I do wish reporters would just stop making stories by writers of color seem like the flavor of the moment. Newsflash: writers of color are here to stay.
Some very lucky New Yorkers will get to hear Art Spiegelman in conversation with Marjane Satrapi tomorrow, as part of PEN’s Foreign Exchanges series. Details:
When: Tuesday, May 10, 2005
What Time: 7:00 p.m.
Where: The New School, 66 West 12th Street, Wollman Hall, Fifth floor (across court)
The New School box office: (212) 229-5488. Price: $10. Call (212) 334-1660, ext. 107, for information.
I would be there in a heartbeat if I was in town, so please write me if you attend. I’d love to know how it went.
The medals commemorating Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize, which were stolen last year, have been replaced by the Swedish Academy. The Indian government says it will take measures to make sure they are not stolen again. In other Tagore news, Bengladesh celebrated the poet’s birth on Sunday.
Nell Freudenberger reviews Stewart O’Nan’s The Good Wife in the New York Times.
O’Nan does a lot of the things they teach you not to do in M.F.A. programs. His excellent novel A Prayer for the Dying, about a Civil War-era undertaker struggling with a diphtheria epidemic, is written in the unwieldy second person. A carload of dead teenagers collectively narrates his thriller The Night Country. In his new book [The Good Wife] O’Nan tells Patty’s story in the present tense, and delivers a mostly sequential description of events. It’s an effective choice, emphasizing Patty’s suddenly limited freedom: “Sometimes she gets to kiss him hello and goodbye when she visits, sometimes not, depending on the guard, depending on the guard’s mood. Her doctor says the metal detector won’t hurt the baby as long as she doesn’t go through it four or five times a day. Some days she goes through two or three times and then worries.”
A while back, Hannah Tinti recommended O’Nan’s The Night Country for Moorishgirl’s underappreciated books series.
John Marshall recaps readings given by Julie Otsuka for the Seattle Reads events that took place over the weekend. The city read Julie Otsuka’s novel, When The Emperor Was Divine.
[Otsuka] had been answering questions from the 130 people packed into the conference room when moderator Tom Ikeda took note of the number of Japanese Americans in the crowd and asked any former internees to please stand.
Hesitantly, they rose to their feet, former internees near the front of the crowd, but also sprinkled throughout, some in groups, others in pairs, a few by themselves, until there were 30 people standing, while many others in the audience felt their hearts rising into their throats, tears welling in their eyes. Then the rest of the audience started to applaud.
I found Otsuka’s novel arrestingly beautiful when I read it a few years ago. None of the main characters in When The Emperor Was Divine are named, and there is very little action, but something about the precise description of mundane events renders the horror of the Japanese internments incredibly real and dangerously close. Marshall asked Otsuka about whether these choices were motivated by the desire to create archetypes, but she says no:
“It just seemed the right voice to tell the story,” she related. “I definitely did not want to shout the story out. I didn’t want the reader to feel lectured. The material is very hot and the way to tell a hot story is with a cool temperature. That way, the awfulness of the story can well up from somewhere within.”