Category: literary life

Last Friday, Lance Olsen’s 10:01 was revealed be one of the five nominees for the LBC’s fall Read This! selection. Today, the LBC toasts another nominee: Kirby Gann’s Napoleon in Rags.

In a piece for the L.A. Times, Scott Martelle writes about fictional floods. He begins with the description of the flood in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God:

Hurston might have been writing about real events. A 1928 hurricane forced Lake Okeechobee over its banks, killing more than 1,800 people, and she lived through a hurricane while visiting the Bahamas a year later. But untethered from reportage, the primal scene touches deep-seated fears that have made cataclysmic storms and floods recurring themes in the human story, such as ancient creation myths and Noah’s famous struggle in the Bible, movies such as”Key Largo,” Delta blues, George Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess,” and Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel “The Makioka Sisters.”

He also discusses the significance of floods in literature, in work by Hurston, Mark Twain, Jane Smiley, and others, including me.

Robert McCrum delivers another defense of Orhan Pamuk in the Observer. You’ll remember that, earlier this year, Pamuk was charged with “denigrating” Turkish identity, and that the story had immediate reverberations in the international literary community. I mentioned the story back in February, noting the offending quote (“30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians had been killed in Turkey”).

The story gathered some momentum again in August, while I was away at a conference. In my attempts to catch up when I got back, my reporting of it became sloppy. For instance, the title of this post refers to a fight between Pamuk and the entire government. In fact, it was a lone, independent prosecutor who is charging Pamuk. In addition, I failed to notice that the quote that is now being reported is different from the one originally mentioned in February (now it includes the rather self-aggrandizing “nobody but me dares to talk about it.”) Lastly, I should also have reminded readers that Snow, Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, refers to the Armenian genocide more than once, and was published with great fanfare in his native Turkey without incident last year.

Regular reader Elizabeth Angell, with whom I correspond on occasion, is currently living in Turkey, and wrote to me with some of her impressions:

[E]veryone I know is horrified at the
prosecution, but they’re all leftists, academics, artists, etc.– there’s no doubt that it’s popular with right-wing nationalists, which is the constituency the local prosector who brought the charges is trying to pander to. (It’s not actually the turkish govt per se that’s pursuing the case, a distinction that keeps getting lost in the international press coverage…)

Elizabeth discusses the entire affair in this post on her blog, Verbal Privilege. She says:

Turgay Evsen, A single state prosecutor in İstanbul’s posh Sisli district filed the charges in what seems to be an attempt to make a name for himself through nationalist grandstanding–he’s previously made similar charges against a Turkish-Armenian journalist, Hrank Dink. Turkey’s new penal code, which was the subject of much protest by Turkish journalists when it was introduced last spring, includes some worthwhile human rights reforms but also contains a deeply stupid and repressive provision allowing such prosecutions. In the case of Pamuk, I would guess it’s quite unlikely that the current Turkish leadership (i.e., Prime Minister Erdogan and the AK Party) instigated or really support the prosecution–it’s embarrassing to them and very damaging to EU-Turkish relations at a crucial time. But they’re in something of a political bind, given that the prosector’s actions are no doubt wildly popular in nationalist circles.

Read the rest here.

Regardless of whether the charges came from one prosecutor or the government, the fact remains that this is a clear breach of freedom of speech. And we here at Moorishgirl doubt that this case will be resolved without continued pressure.

The anxiety over whether fiction is relevant after 9/11 or whether it is capable of representing a “new reality” continues. In an essay in the New York Times last week, Benjamin Kunkel prophesied that:

[F]ictional characters will no longer turn terrorist in the same numbers; imaginary indigenous terrorism reminds us too much of real foreign terror. And set against the regular hecatombs of global jihad, much fictional violence seems almost pathetically modest.

I disagree. I think novelists will in fact continue to write about the world around them, once they’ve had enough perspective on particular events. Besides, terrorism has been a part of human experience long before 9/11 and novelists from those countries affected by it have dealt with it. (I’m thinking of Algerian writers, in particular.)

Elsewhere, Jay McInerney defends fiction from those who, like Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, consider it dead:

Naipaul essentially argues – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – that non-fiction is better suited than fiction to dealing with the big issues and capturing the way we live now. An accompanying essay, “Truth is Stronger than Fiction”, expanded on the theme, and concluded with a lament: “It’s safe to say that no novels have yet engaged with the post-September 11 era in any meaningful way.” To which we might ask, just for starters, where is the movie, or the big non-fiction tome that has done so.

Jim Lynch (with whom I had the pleasure of reading at the PNBA celebration of authors two weeks ago), is profiled in Newsday. Lynch’s debut novel, The Highest Tide, is the coming-of-age story of one Miles O’Malley, and insomniac and undersized thirteen year old who spends his time exploring marine life in the tidal flats around the Puget Sound.

Despite Lynch’s deep and apparent love of marine biology, he insists “The Highest Tide” isn’t an “issue” novel: “I didn’t set out to write an environmentalist book. If there’s any activism to it, it’s along the lines of what Rachel Carson was saying: Pay attention to what’s around you and you’re less likely to harm it.”

Read the rest of the profile here.

Over at the L.A. Times, Michael Mewshaw discusses T.C. Boyle’s new collection of stories, Tooth and Claw, calling it an “impressive miscellany of styles, genres, voices and subjects.” The title story appeared in the New Yorker a couple of years ago, and you can read it here.

Writing in the SF Chronicle, Alan Cheuse praises Yiyun Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: “Her prose is wonderfully complex, emotive and smart, so good, in fact, that it makes her fellow Chinese ex-pat Ha Jin read like a mere carpenter.” Also in the paper is a review of Leila Aboulela’s second novel (her first in America), Minaret. Critic and blogger Chandrahas Choudhury says it “attends carefully to the dwindle and ebb of religion in a secularized world, one that treats religion like a lifestyle choice when — we are invited to consider — it may be more like a necessity.”

After Michiko Kakutani’s glowing assessment in the daily NY Times, Frank Rich delivers another rave for On Beauty in the Sunday book review section. While Kakutani focused on the book’s similarities with Howards End, Rich highlights the cultural and ideological wars that the two families (the fathers, in fact) engage in and finds that Smith is the “fearless outside referee” needed to adjudicate said wars.

Also of note is Andrea Barrett’s review of Myla Goldberg’s new novel, Wickett’s Remedy. Set in Boston during the 1918 flu epidemic, the novel is “wonderfully well-written,” though it loses track of its characters in “a mass of historical detail,” Barrett says.