News

Even though we moved back to Los Angeles about two months ago, I have yet to catch up with all my forwarded mail. And I still have not renewed any of my usual subscriptions (except for the New York Review of Books). So it’s with more than a little wistfulness that I look at interesting issues of some magazines. This week’s New Yorker, for instance, has a wonderful poem by Robert Bly, an essay by Elizabeth Kolbert about the disturbing tendency by U.S. automakers to take billions in government help without producing fuel-efficient cars, and a piece on the Frida Kahlo “cult” (of which I will freely admit to being a member.)

Orhan Pamuk has a brief essay at the Guardian about reading the Paris Review interviews as a young author in Istanbul. “In the beginning,” he writes, “I read these interviews because I loved these writers’ books, because I wished to to learn their secrets, to understand how they created their fictive worlds. But I also enjoyed reading interviews with novelists and poets whose names I hardly knew, and whose books I had not read.”

I heard the incredible story of twin sisters Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein on NPR yesterday. Here’s the blurb from the station’s site:

Separated in infancy and given up for adoption, Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein grew up unaware that they had an identical twin. Their new memoir, Identical Strangers, chronicles their story of separation, reunion and identity.

Records from the adoption agency indicate that the identical twins’ separation and adoption placement in the late 1960s was connected to a psychological study investigating the effects of nature versus nurture.

The segment is a bit long, but it’s absolutely fascinating.

My review of Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Cion appears in the November 12 issue of The Nation, but the piece is already available online. I wrote this back in August, but my editor at the magazine left to join the LRB, so it took a little while to get the piece through with the transition. Here’s an excerpt:

Over his long and prolific career, South African writer Zakes Mda has produced plays, novels and stories that explore very different characters, eras and landscapes. In Ways of Dying, two childhood friends from a small village in South Africa reconnect decades later in an unnamed city, their relationship fulfilled only when they reconcile with their painful past. In The Heart of Redness, villagers in the Eastern Cape fight over whether to celebrate or denigrate the legacy of a nineteenth-century teenager who prophesied that if the Xhosa people killed their cattle and burned their crops, the ancestors would be resurrected to defeat the British colonizers. The Madonna of Excelsior chronicles the coming of age of a South African woman whose mother and father were tried in 1971 under the Immorality Act for having interracial sex. Mda’s latest book, Cion, is set in a small town in Ohio that once provided refuge for runaway slaves. It features a cast of characters who struggle with how to fit this important historical fact into their lives, their relationships and even their art. The connecting thread in all these novels seems to be the unresolved presence of the past. It hovers like a ghost, at once forbidding and inviting, seductive and terrifying, depressing and inspiring.

Mda is deeply concerned with how people remember the past, how they use it to shape the present, how they call upon it to fashion modern selves, modern identities–and how in the process they run the risk of exploiting or sentimentalizing it. Given Mda’s life story, which is marked by all the major events of his country, one can see why he has such a keen interest in history.

More here.

This week, both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report–the only TV programs I never miss–went on hiatus, so Comedy Central has been doing re-runs. It’s been a small taste of what life will be like if members of the Writers’ Guild of America decide to go on strike. At Salon, Laura Miller reviews Marc Norman’s What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting and starts off with a few anecdotes about the contempt with which screenwriters are held in Hollywood, then reveals some of the uglier side of the business. All very interesting.