Category: literary life

In a guest column at Mobylives, Renata Dumitrascu questions Ismail Kadare’s right to call himself a dissident.

In accepting this year’s Man Booker International Prize, Albanian writer Ismail Kadare criticized people from ex-communist countries who claim they were not allowed to be writers by the repressive system. He contemptuously declared “The people entitled to speak about that period are the people who did something and not the people who kept silent and have retrospective nostalgia.”
There is a lot of similarity between Kadare’s rhetoric and that of other self-styled “dissident” writers from the communist period in Eastern European countries: a need to cast themselves into false roles of national anti-totalitarian heroes, when in fact, most of them led lives of privilege during the worst repression and continue to do so.

Michael Orthofer, of the Complete Review, disagrees:

These words [as quoted by Dumitrascu] are not — as implied — from the speech he made accepting the prize, but rather from comments made to the press (see, for example, this report) — and they don’t appear to target actual silenced writers, but rather poseurs.

Orthofer concedes that Kadare sounded a bit full of himself on accepting the International Man Booker Prize, but he says:

His insistence on a focus on literature rather than politics is obviously the only way for him to go (given his all-too-regime-friendly behaviour and privileged status). Given the alternatives — exile or silence (imposed, one way or another, by the all-powerful regime) — the path Kadare chose doesn’t seem the worst alternative. Sure, he’s not a poster-child for opposition to a horrible wrong, but as far as fellow-travelling goes, there’s an argument to be made that his form was justifiable.

Over at Slate, April Bernard doesn’t spare the latest John Irving:

Incest, mutilation, orphans, wrestling, prose only a mother could love–yes, it’s another John Irving novel. And Until I Find You–full of the author’s characteristic storytelling drive, macabre imagination, and lumpy sentences–arrives with an added frisson: the pre-publication announcement of its autobiographical roots. Jack, the hero, is sexually handled and molested by older girls and women by the age of 10; he longs for a father who left before he was born; he joins the wrestling team at a New England prep school; his eventual fame is compromised by a sense of vacancy and abandonment and a search for sexual and personal security that eludes him. These basics will be familiar to readers of Irving’s earlier novels, so it is not surprising–though it is clearly meant to be titillating–to learn they are autobiographical in origin. In fact, one suspects that the PR release of this “confession” (and the news that, while he was writing the book, Irving did at last find out who his father was) is designed to forestall the criticism such a dreadful, though clearly heartfelt, mess like this deserves.

Over at the Guardian, Robert McCrum wonders whether book reviews matter. He asks the question mostly from the point of view of authors: should they bother reading their reviews? And then trots out a few anecdotes.

Morocco Times: 10 Questions For JK Rowling.

The WSJ’s Vauhini Vara reports on publishers’ attempts to create fake websites and blogs to promote novels.

Abdallah Al-Ryami, an Omani poet and playwright, was jailed last week for “criticizing human rights violations” in his country. Reporters Sans Frontieres has a little background on the case.