A longish profile of Dave Eggers appears in the FT this weekend, and I only link to it because it contains a few amusing, semi-sarcastic observations, like this one:
He is part of that American tradition where being a successful author isn’t quite enough. You have to be a whole home entertainment system.
Of the books I read, I review very few on my blog, so since it’s a Friday and I’m procrastinating, I thought I’d post a little bit about what I’ve read lately.
I just finished Nedjma’s The Almond, which I thought was bloody awful. It had almost no character development, and the plot was fairly uninspired. The erotic part was well-written, though, if you’re into that sort of thing, but even that sank into problems of its own.
I did, however, enjoy War by Candlelight, Daniel Alarcon’s debut collection, which is set mostly in and around Lima. In his writing, the city is treated as a character and I thought that was beautifully done.
I’m nearly finished with Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. It’s set during the Gulf war, and it features a wide range of characters who all inhabit the same art-deco building in Cairo. It’s a light, fun read, with occasional eyebrow-raising comments (about women, sex, and gays) that are left to the reader to interpret. I’ll probably have more to say about it in a couple of weeks.
I just started Kevin Smokler’s anthology Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, which features essays by Adam Johnson, Meghan Daum, Tom Bissell, and Nell Freudenberger, among others. Smokler was in Portland yesterday for a reading, and he shared some thought-provoking observations about books and the state of reading today.
I know I’ve mentioned this book before several times, and I will mention it again: I loved Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion, which is set in 1899 in Zanzibar, and tracks the consequences of a forbidden love affair across three generations. I found it beautifully written, incredibly compelling, and profoundly relevant. It comes out this month, and I really urge you to read it.
Lord helps us. Another review of The Almond, and another reviewer who doesn’t get it. Here’s an example:
Nedjma writes in painstaking – and often painful – detail about Islamic customs regarding marriage and sexual practices. “No, I didn’t love Hmed, but I did think he’d be of use to me, at least – he’d make a woman of me. Free me and cover me with gold and kisses,” Badra says of her husband. Then: “All he managed to do was deprive me of my laughter.”
The book tells the story of one woman from Imchouk, one woman who goes to Tangier and takes a lover. How the hell do you go from that to “Islamic customs”? What the hell are Islamic customs anyway? Bosnian? Malaysian? Chinese? French? What?
Well this should be interesting. Mark Sarvas, who’s been doing the L.A. Times Book Review Thumbnail on his blog, The Elegant Variation, will be on an open source radio show with Steve Wasserman, outgoing editor of the review. Kevin Smokler will also be a guest, so it should make for a very interesting show. You can stream it live here at 4 pm Pacific time.
Or you can listen to Bookworm on KCRW, where Michael Silverblatt will be hosting a show on Asian identity in writing, with guests Don Lee, Susan Choi, and Maxine Hong Kingston. You can stream it live here at 2:30 pm Pacific time.
Over at the Book Standard, Jessa Crispin writes about what she’s missing out on: literature in translation.
Recently I noticed just how much I was missing out on when I saw how many works by Julio Cortazar (1914-84), one of my favorite writers, have not been translated into English. Archipelago recently released the first English translation, by Anne McLean, of The Diary of Andres Fava. I was so impressed by the novella that I wanted to get in contact with McLean to talk about the work of translation and the books of the masterful Belgian-born Argentine who is so well-known by Spanish and Latin American readers, but virtually invisible to English-speaking ones.
As a child, I read in Arabic and French (both in the original or from other languages translated into the Arabic or the French) and that state of affairs seemed completely normal to me. When I came to the States, I was surprised to find out how little of world literature people seemed to read. And things aren’t improving, with literature in translation being constantly curtailed to make room for the Da Vinci Codes and Harry Potters.
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish lashes out at militants who have taken to disrupting cultural events, the SF Chronicle reports:
It’s been a hot summer on the Palestinian arts scene: gunmen broke up the concert of a popular West Bank singer after he refused to limit his repertoire to political songs, and a Hamas-run town banned a music festival to prevent mingling of the sexes.
Now, Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish is striking back, saying fanatics have no right to deprive Palestinians of beauty in their lives. “There are Taliban-type elements in our society, and this is a very dangerous sign,” Darwish told a gathering of artists and intellectuals this week.
It’s not just an argument over artistic freedom, but over whether a future Palestinian state will be a theocracy or a pluralistic democracy.
Read the rest here.