Category: book reviews / recommendations

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.

Lately, there’s been a veritable deluge of books on how to read. (See Reading Like A Writer; Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, even How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read.) It seems writers and critics are worried that the art of reading is becoming passé.

The other day, at the dentist, the technician asked how come my appointment was in the middle of the morning. “I have a flexible schedule,” I said.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I’m a writer.”
“Oh, wow. So, like, you have a book?”
“Yes, I do.”
“So is it at, like, Costco?”
I wasn’t so much startled by the mention of a big chain like Costco as I was that the first question about the book was its store placement rather than its content. Everyone buys books. Who reads them, though?

So books like John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel, which came out last fall and which I started reading two days ago, seem necessary to me. This is meant for the general reader who may not always be aware of what is going on in the world of books, but there are some juicy literary tidbits, too. I love the examples he uses to make his points. For instance, to highlight divergent reader reactions, he brings up Disgrace–I can’t tell you how many arguments I’ve had about that novel with people. Occasionally, though, his sense of humor reminds me of my dad’s. (Commenting on the popularity of iPods, he says “Head implants, doubtless, are on the way, for the dedicated music lover. Seattle is working on it.” Har, har, Dad.) Still, his love for books comes across on every page, so even if you didn’t already love books, you’d love them by the time you were done with this tome.

My review of Elias Khoury’s new novel, Yalo, appeared on the cover of Sunday’s edition of the L. A. Times Book Review. The piece also makes mention of two of Khoury’s earlier books, Little Mountain and City Gates, which have just recently been re-issued. Here’s an excerpt:

Few cities have withstood the kind of violence and carnage that Beirut has. Though destroyed by a civil war lasting 15 long years, it seemed to be on the verge of an economic and cultural renaissance in 2006 when it was bombed again during the Israeli invasion. Beirut is a city that has learned to start over, to rebuild itself on top of its ruins, but it is also a place where memories are long and myths are persistent. In his new novel, “Yalo,” Elias Khoury grapples with the idea of truth and memory, what we choose to remember and what we prefer to forget. In fact, “Yalo” is composed of confessions — whether forced or voluntary, true or laced with self-aggrandizement, redemptive for the confessor or entirely useless.

The rest of the review is freely available on the L.A. Times website.

My review of Sinan Antoon’s debut novel, I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, appears in the January 21 issue of The Nation magazine. Here is how it opens:

Legend has it that in the eleventh century, when the very eccentric and possibly demented Caliph El Hakim needed some money, he wrote a letter to the governor of Jerusalem asking that a tax be levied. The governor wrote back that this was impossible–most of the people were poor, many of them monks who lived in caves in Wad er-Rabâbeh. El Hakim asked his scribe to write a letter with the command “Count the men.” Whether the scribe made a mistake or whether the letter was intercepted, no one really knows. But by the time the letter arrived in Jerusalem it read “Castrate the men.” In Arabic, the difference between the two verbs hasaa and khasaa is a single dot.

The history of the Arabic language is full of such tales, in which a dot can change the meaning of a word entirely. In fact, the original Arabic alphabet consisted of consonant letters only, some of which corresponded to multiple sounds.

And it is that aspect of the language that Antoon’s novel exploits, to great literary effect. You can read the review here.