Michael Cunningham will be reading from his new novel, Specimen Days, at Powell’s tonight. Details:
Tuesday the 21st at 7.30 pm
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W Burnside
I’m actually going to drag myself out of the house for this one, so come by and say hi if you’re there.
You can listen to Alan Cheuse review the book on NPR. Here’s also the SF Chronicle review.
The NY Times profiles Helen Oyeyemi, the young Nigerian author whose first novel, The Icarus Girl, was released to much acclaim in the U.K. earlier this year. Here’s a snippet:
“We didn’t understand that we could be in the stories,” she said of herself and her other classmates of color. “Or that people like us could be in the stories.”
“I never got particularly good marks for the stories I wrote,” she continued. “And I read them over. And I started to see that in a fundamental sense they weren’t true. Not only were they just not very good technically in terms of the writing, but there was something missing.”
Only when Nigeria came into her stories did things ring true, she recalled. She met Nigeria, so to speak, through the novel “Yoruba Girl Dancing,” by Simi Bedford, about a Nigerian girl in London dealing with assimilation issues. “We didn’t understand that we could be in the stories,” she said of herself and her other classmates of color. “Or that people like us could be in the stories.”
“I never got particularly good marks for the stories I wrote,” she continued. “And I read them over. And I started to see that in a fundamental sense they weren’t true. Not only were they just not very good technically in terms of the writing, but there was something missing.”
Only when Nigeria came into her stories did things ring true, she recalled. She met Nigeria, so to speak, through the novel “Yoruba Girl Dancing,” by Simi Bedford, about a Nigerian girl in London dealing with assimilation issues.
The Icarus Girl is now available in the U.S.
Several MG readers have written in to draw my attention to Alan Riding’s profile of Nedjma, the pseudonymous author of The Almond, an erotic novel set in Morocco, and which is coming out with Grove/Atlantic this month. (By the way, the book was also reviewed together with Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries.) Clearly, the NY Times doesn’t want you to miss this book. It’s got Muslim women! And sex! And mysterious pseudonyms!
There are two components to this hoopla that I find by turns amusing and troubling. One is the attempt at titillation by juxtaposing the stereotype of the covered, submissive Muslim woman with promises of revelations about what happens behind the veil. This, I am used to, and no longer care. But the other is the claim that this novel is some sort of landmark. It is not.
And now it appears that the author herself cultivates this image:
She said that even though she never expected the book to be published, she wrote it in French because it seemed less shocking to write about sex in a language that is not her mother tongue. “In any event, if I’d written in Arabic, it would never have been published,” she said. “Nor will it. It’s a thousand years since Muslims have written openly about sex. If you find an Arab publisher, I’ll buy you a bottle of Champagne.”
Clearly, Nedjma hasn’t read any of the sexually explicit material in works by Ahdaf Soueif or Alifa Rifaat or Nawal Al-Saadawi (all of whom have been published or translated into Arabic, thankyouverymuch.) And since she appears to be familiar enough with Algerian literature to use the title of a novel by Kateb Yacine as a pseudonym, she should also be familiar with Algerian writer Assia Djebar, whose work has also dealt with sexuality very openly. And that’s just for women. I can think of plenty of men, as well, starting with Mohammed Choukri, Mohammed Mrabet, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and so on.
Despite my griping about the book’s presentation and reception, I am actually looking forward to reading it and seeing how it fares as a book of fiction (since that is what it is.) I managed to get a copy of it at BEA (one of the few I brought back with me) and look forward to checking it out for myself.
Algerian writer Assia Djebbar has joined the ranks of the Academie Francaise this year. (For those unfamiliar with the body: it’s got 40 members, the vast majority of whom are white men, not all of them writers by vocation, and their role is vaguely defined as “watching over the French language.”) I remember as a kid reading (in Paris-Match, of all places) that Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman to be elected member. (In 1980. I mean, seriously!)
I love Assia Djebbar’s work, and I can see how this is a huge honor for her, but it strikes me as slightly ironic (though unremarkable, perhaps) that she is now charged with protecting the language of her country’s previous colonizer. On the other hand, ‘francophonie’ isn’t going away anytime soon, and if millions and millions of North Africans are going to speak the language, then they might as well be represented in the body that produces the ultimate resource on French–Le Dictionnaire. Maybe she can get them to put the word “Beur” in it.
Those unfamiliar with Assia Djebbar should really check out L’amour, La Fantasia, which is available in English.
Link cribbed from Lit Saloon.
The August 2005 book festival in Edinburgh is already getting press–more than 500 authors will converge on the town for a fortnight. The Scotsman has further details (and a picture of a youthful-looking Salman Rushdie, sans beard.)
The Guardian asked a few writers and critics, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Monica Ali, Ian Jack, and James Wood for their summer reading recommendations. Richard Eye gives his vote to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel Desertion, and, having been fortunate enough to read the galley, I, too, would recommend it unreservedly. I also notice that Orhan Pamuk’s novels Snow and My Name is Red get many votes (including Doris Lessing’s), as does his latest work, the memoir Istanbul. Tom Paulin recommends Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries, which I also plan on reading very soon.