Category: literary life
A controversial bill that was introduced in Britain last June would make it illegal to say or write anything that might offend people of any religion. The bill came under criticism because its vague wording would quite likely threaten free speech. In response, PEN has recently published a collection of essays, titled Free Expression is No Offence. You can read excerpts from the contributions by Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie in the Guardian. Here’s a snippet from Monica Ali’s contribution:
What’s the problem here? I think there are many but I want to set them out in three broad areas. The first concerns the differences between race and religion as far as free speech is concerned. It is not in the faintest way plausible to vilify a particular race and to claim that no harm is intended towards members, individually or collectively, of that racial group.
Religions, on the other hand, are sets of ideas and beliefs. They should not be privileged over any other set of notions. I am not bound to respect the idea that I may be reincarnated as an insect or a donkey or that Jesus is the son of God or anything else that I regard as mumbo-jumbo. Indeed, if there are aspects and practices of a religion that conflict with my own notions and beliefs (of fairness and justice and so on) then the moral onus is on me to speak up against them. If I loathe the fact that Islam has been used to deny the right of women in Saudi Arabia to vote then I ought to say so.
Read it all here.
Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my views on the novel and its relation to the world at large, so I quite appreciated Walter Mosley’s essay in the Washington Post this weekend, in which he says of the writer’s task:
The mastery of language is our duty. We enter this world by placing one word after another in comprehensible and unique ways. And then, of course, there’s what the author is willing to talk about. When politics enters our writing, we are often asked by our representatives, our teachers, and sometimes our audience to step back from outspoken and controversial opinions about how this world works. Many times I’ve been told by people I respect, “There’s too much emphasis on race in this book,” or “The government and the police aren’t really like that.”
I am asked not to stand down but to stand back — behind the line of good taste.
“Books are entertainments,” I am told. “No one wants to hear your ideas about how the world works or what’s wrong with America.”
Of course they don’t. The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink. If writing was always only a good adventure with a teary or cheery ending, books would not be worth the effort to read or to write.
Novels are about the world we live in. No one is suggesting that they should be propaganda for oil companies and fast food concerns. Or there to justify unjust wars or the American Way. Nor should they be apologies for anarchic maniacs who seek in their distress to destroy an entire world. But to the extent that these things are in our world, we should write about them.
Read the rest of this excellent essay here.
Jonathan Lethem writes an appreciation of Italo Calvino for the NYTBR.
Calvino, it seemed to me, had managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic. Calvino, with his frequent references to comics and folktales and film, and his droll probing of contemporary scientific and philosophical theories, had encompassed motifs associated with brows both high and low in an internationally lucid style, one wholly his own.
More here.
Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation has been getting lots of buzz. The novel is about a precocious young boy who’s conscripted to serve in the army of an unnamed African nation, to fight in its civil war.
Beast has received rave reviews in the Washington Post, the New Zealand Herald, and, today, in the New York Times. A friend emailed me the other day to say he’d really enjoyed it, which piqued my interest.
Portland writer and small press publisher Kevin Sampsell has written a guest column on author appreciation over at Beatrice. I want a Sam Lipsyte pin.
Add Shi Tao to the long list of writers who are considered threats because of what they say:
The Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao will not be in New York on Tuesday November 22 to collect his Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Press Freedom Award – he is serving a 10-year prison sentence with forced labour in Chishan Prison, Yuanjiang City.
Read about it here.