Category: literary life

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Hannah Arendt’s work, so it was a special treat to come across Adam Kirsch’s excellent article about her in this week’s New Yorker. Here is the opening paragraph:

In 1999, the Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić visited The Hague to observe the trials for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. Among the defendants was Goran Jelisić, a thirty-year-old Serb from Bosnia, who struck her as “a man you can trust.” With his “clear, serene face, lively eyes, and big reassuring grin,” he reminded Drakulić of one of her daughter’s friends. Many of the witnesses at The Hague shared this view of the defendant—even many Muslims, who told the court how Jelisić helped an old Muslim neighbor repair her windows after they were shattered by a bomb, or how he helped another Muslim friend escape Bosnia with his family. But the Bosnian Muslims who had known Jelisić seven years earlier, when he was a guard at the Luka prison camp, had different stories to tell. Over a period of eighteen days in 1992, they testified, Jelisić himself killed more than a hundred prisoners. As Drakulić writes, he chose his victims at random, by asking “a man to kneel down and place his head over a metal drainage grating. Then he would execute him with two bullets in the back of the head from his pistol, which was equipped with a silencer.” He liked to introduce himself with the words “Hitler was the first Adolf, I am the second.” He was sentenced to forty years in prison.

None of Drakulić’s experience in creating fictional characters could help her understand such a mind, which remained all the more unfathomable because of Jelisić’s apparent normality, even gentleness. “The more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become,” she wrote. What Drakulić discovered, in other words, is what Hannah Arendt, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem, some forty years earlier, called “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

The essay covers a lot of ground—including Arendt’s troubled, and troubling, relationship with Heidegger and how the experience contributed to her intellectual growth. You can read the entire piece online, here.

I’m thrilled to hear that the Moroccan novelist, essayist, and critic Abdelfettah Kilito has a new book out in the United States, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, which is billed as a meditation on the role of language, translation, and bilingualism in Arabic literature. The book is translated into English by the talented Wail Hassan (the author of an excellent critical evaluation of Tayeb Salih’s fiction.)

(Via the Literary Saloon.)

What a thrill it was to find that the New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of 2008 includes the collection of poems Half of the World in Light by my friend and UCR colleague Juan Felipe Herrera!  Felicidades, JFH!

The December 1 issue of the Nation includes a review by Siddhartha Deb of Elias Khoury’s most recent novel, Yalo. Here is the opening paragraph:

The fragments of the past never add up to a whole in Beirut. The city seems to communicate in images rather than in narrative, presenting a kaleidoscope of car bomb assassinations and refugee camps, Israeli warplanes and Hezbollah fighters, shards that whirl before our eyes without yielding much meaning. And these pieces are only from recent years, thrown up by a city that already holds in its subterranean layers the 1975-90 civil war, with its militias and massacres, and long before that the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and colonial occupation by the French. When a writer attempts, then, to make Beirut the source of his work, one can understand why the first principle of his aesthetic is that a fragmented city demands a fragmented novel.

Aside from Yalo, Deb also covers Little Mountain and Gate of the Sun. (I reviewed Khoury for the Los Angeles Times a few months ago; if you’re curious about my take, you can click here.)

I noticed The World is What It Is—Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul—last week at the bookstore, but I wasn’t particularly in the mood to read 500 pages about someone as unpleasant as Naipaul. Dwight Garner’s review of the book makes me want to reconsider:

Well, the reader thinks, here we go: Mr. French’s 550-page biography will be a long string of bummers, a forced march through the life of a startlingly original writer with an ugly, remote personality.

The good news is that Mr. French, a young British journalist, is certainly unafraid to face unpleasant facts about his subject. But the better news about “The World Is What It Is” is this: it’s one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious and, well, funniest biographies of a living writer (Mr. Naipaul is 76) to come along in years.

Mr. French is a relative rarity among biographers, a real writer, and at his best he sounds like a combination of that wily bohemian Geoff Dyer and that wittily matter-of-factual cyborg Michael Kinsley.

Even the cameos in Mr. French’s biography are crazily vivid. Here is his hole-in-one description of the editor Francis Wyndham: “Popular, gentle, solitary and eccentric, Wyndham lived with his mother, wore heavy glasses and high-waisted trousers, gave off random murmurs and squeaks and moved with an amphibian gait.”

You can read it all here. (more…)

Even though I had a formidable migraine and could hardly stand to read by the lamplight, the opening to Mark Danner’s new piece in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books completely drew me in:

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream. First, revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration. Then, investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept. And finally expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace.

It is a myth, of course, but a lovely one.

You see what I mean? You can read the whole piece here.