News

My friend Mark Sarvas has just published his first novel, Harry, Revised. It’s about a recently widowed man who finds love at the most unexpected of times, and has to reinvent himself in order to win the woman for whom he’s fallen. I read it when it was still in draft form, and I really liked how it dealt with the subject of grief without being stern or preachy. I admired the fact that it’s a very sympathetic and complex look at a pretty pathetic man. And, of course, it’s full of humor. Now that Harry, Revised is finally out in bookstores, I’m looking forward to reading the final version.

Sarvas will be going on book tour at the end of the month, so check out his website for dates.

On Saturday I had an op-ed in The Boston Globe about the politics of fear in the current presidential election. Here’s how it opens:

A FEW weeks ago, I received an e-mail with the subject line: “Excited about Barack Obama? Read this.”

The e-mail contained a copy of a Jan. 22 Senate memo, signed by the presidential candidate, in which he asked the American ambassador to the United Nations to “ensure that the Security Council issue no statement and pass no resolution” about the situation in Gaza unless it included a full condemnation of Hamas.

At the time the memo was sent, Gaza had been closed by Israeli forces for several days, its only power plant had ceased operating, and its 1.5 million Palestinian inhabitants had little or no access to food. The e-mail was sent to hundreds of Arab- and Muslim-Americans, and it ended with a bold, highlighted line: “Think again before you cast your vote for another AIPAC puppet,” referring to the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

I just heard news that the Martinican man of letters Aimé Césaire, who authored the classic Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, who inspired such different people as Frantz Fanon and Leopold Sedar Senghor, and who created the undeniably influential but now occasionally derided concept of négritude, has passed away in Fort-de-France. He was 94.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy is due to attend the funeral on Sunday. I wonder if his speech will bear any similarities to the the one he gave in Dakar last summer.

The magazine Granta, which recently changed editors, has a new issue out, and a newly refurbished site to go with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Online Only section has an opinion piece by Ngugi wa Thiong’o on the crisis in Kenya:

The title of Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, best captures the complex mixture of emotions I felt as I watched televised images of fire and death stalking Kenyan streets. An otherwise smooth election marked by a spirited competition of views among citizens went awry at the moment of tallying. The result of the tallying became a dance of absurdity, with claims and counterclaims of rigging by the main contesting parties: Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU). The chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK), whose word would have helped those not at the scene make sense of it all, declared a winner, handed him the winner’s certificate and then said he knew the true presidential winner. The aggrieved party went to the streets but refused to go to the courts.

The dance of absurdity became a dance of death.

The article is available in full here. There is also a photo essay by Nick Danziger of the infamous French banlieues: The Paris Intifada. To read Andrew Hussey’s article, though, you will need to be a subscriber.

This year the London Book Fair hosted the Arab World as its special guest, so the focus has been on Arabic literature. The Guardian caught up with a number of Arab writers and asked them which works they think should be read today and The Independent‘s Boyd Tonkin has a very good overview of recent developments in the Arab literary scene. There’s even a mention of the detective novel by Abdelilah Hamdouchi that I keep hearing about. It comes out here in the U.S. in May, under the title The Final Wager.