Category: literary life

A Czech institute has published a police report claiming that Milan Kundera denounced a spy named Miroslav Dvoracek to the Communist police in 1950.  Kundera vehemently denies the charge.

Dvoracek, the story goes, had left Czekoslovakia in 1948, and was living in Germany when he was recruited by the US to spy for them.  He was sent back to his country.  While on a visit to Prague, he left a suitcase in a friend’s dorm room; the friend told her boyfriend; the boyfriend told Kundera; and Kundera allegedly whent to the police. Dvoracek was arrested and later sentenced to 22 years in prison.  The AFP reports:

Kundera denied he ever reported on Dvoracek’s whereabouts.

“I didn’t know the man at all,” he told the CTK news agency.

Kundera, who has refused to speak to the press for years, said the institute and the media had committed “an attack on an author,” adding that the police document discovered by the historians was a mystery to him.

He said “my memory has not tricked me, I did not work for the secret police.”

Dvoracek is now 80 years old and lives in Sweden. Who knows what really happened? A document is such an easy thing to produce. The truth is a little harder to ascertain.

Khaled Hosseini, the author of book-club favorites The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has an opinion piece in the Washington Post about John McCain and Sarah Palin’s not-so-veiled accusations that Barack Obama is a terrorist.

Twice last week alone, speakers at McCain-Palin rallies have referred to Sen. Barack Obama, with unveiled scorn, as Barack Hussein Obama. Never mind that this evokes — and brazenly tries to resurrect — the unsavory, cruel days of our past that we thought we had left behind. Never mind that such jeers are deeply offensive to millions of peaceful, law-abiding Muslim Americans who must bear the unveiled charge, made by some supporters of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin, that Obama’s middle name makes him someone to distrust — and, judging by some of the crowd reactions at these rallies, someone to persecute or even kill. As a secular Muslim, I too was offended. Obama’s middle name differs from my last name by only two vowels. Does the McCain-Palin campaign view me as a pariah too? Do McCain and Palin think there’s something wrong with my name?

What has been truly revolting is watching this clip, where a woman at a McCain rally said that Obama was an “Arab” and John McCain retorted, “No Ma’am, he’s a decent family man.” Apparently the two qualifiers are mutually exclusive in his universe.

And the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to France’s Jean-Marie Le Clezio.

Yesterday’s pile of mail brought with it a copy of Nadeem Aslam’s new novel The Wasted Vigil, which is set in Afghanistan. If the words “set in Afghanistan” make you fear that this is simply a quick, topical, realist book that attempts to cash in on current interest in the region, you may be interested to read Pankaj Mishra’s essay about the novel in the New York Review of Books:

Certainly, if these readers feel that “what contemporary writers perceive and say is in some fundamental way divorced from reality,” it is because few novels in the years preceding 2001 manifested an awareness of the events that have led up to our tormented present.

Given this lack of predecessors Nadeem Aslam’s new novel is an audacious panorama, seeking as it does to encapsulate several national histories as well as the overlapping destinies of individuals caught up in apparently disparate events. A quick survey of its spacious historical terrain—Russian brutality in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Muslim fundamentalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the war on terror and the American recourse to torture, and the resurgence of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in post–September 11 Afghanistan—makes us initially suspect that the novel is as noisy and sprawling as it is aggressively topical. Yet Aslam manages to describe the lives of his many characters, and their illusions and despair, with consummate skill.

The article is available to subscribers only, unfortunately. Take a look here.

Luis Alfaro reviews Gustavo Arellano’s new book, a memoir called Orange County: A Personal History. Arellano is is the author of Ask A Mexican, based on his famed columns and radio interviews. This new book charts his family’s history, its travels from El Cargadero to Anaheim, and the challenges that come from living in this ultra-conservative, anti-immigrant enclave. Here’s a snippet from the review:

The opening pages of “Orange County” provide an assessment of the place today. It’s still affluent and politically powerful with a large conservative base. According to a recent census, however, the demographics are shifting; the population is now roughly 60% white, 30% Latino/Hispanic (a number that has nearly doubled in the last 15 years), with a rapidly growing Asian community. Thirty percent of its residents are foreign-born.

And yet, writes Arellano, it’s not just television that has failed to paint a realistic portrait of Orange County. Also to blame are the founding fathers and historians who “follow a tight OC Story, almost positivist in predetermined steps and outcome. . . . We don’t care for the facts — we print the legend.”

You can read the rest here.

Michael Chabon has an article in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books about Barack Obama’s candidacy.  This paragraph made me smile, which I really needed today, what with the news of bailouts and economic meltdowns and political stunts:

The problem was not Obama; the problem was that at the instant when Hillary Clinton at last conceded, the nature of the campaign changed. It was, I considered (…) like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had done the impossible, against Sardaukar and imperial shock troops alike. We had brought water to Arrakis. Now the gathered tribes of the Democratic Party—hacks, Teamsters, hat ladies, New Mexicans, residents of those states most nearly resembling Canada, Jews of South Florida, dreadlocks, crewcuts, elderlies and goths, a cowboy or two, sons and daughters of interned Japanese-Americans—had assembled on the plains of Denver to attempt to vanquish old Saruman McCain.

Here’s the article in full.  Meanwhile, what does it say about our political culture that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the nut job head of state of Iran, can travel to New York, give an open press conference, and face reporters in unscripted questions, while Sarah Palin, the VP candidate, still hasn’t?