Category: literary life

The latest issue of Words Without Borders is devoted to Syria. The poet and frequent Nobel candidate Adonis naturally gets a mention, but they also have poems and stories by Ibrahim Samu’il, Haifa’ Bitar, Hasiba Abd al-Rahman, and Faraj Bayraqdar. Poor Nizar Qabbani is mentioned last. Then there is “The Lanterns of Seville,” a mesmerizing story by Abd el-Salam al-Ujayli about Moorish Spain.

“People say that it is a myth, but in Meknes alone I know of ten houses where the Keys of Return hang from their portals. Five centuries ago our ancestors, yours and mine, dear cousin, were forced out of this country to the shores of Africa. In the confusion of defeat and the humiliation of loss, they could not carry with them the land that they had watered with their blood nor the palaces their hands had built or the art treasures they had created in the paradise of Andalusia. They left everything behind, fleeing with their lives. But some carried with them to the other shore the keys of their palaces as mementos of the lost paradise and as prompts for the return. If by chance you were to enter the old homes in the alleys of Meknes, Fez, Melilla, all the way to Kayrawan, you will find in any one of them, at the entrance, a rusty key, its meaning forgotten by the present owners who think that it is nothing but a useless object. But if you really know the extent of what the world owes our ancestors, you had better kiss that rusty metal object and lift it up to your forehead in reverence, for it is one of the many Keys of Return.”

Link via Beatrice.

NPR’s Martha Woodruff talks to Daniel Alarcon about his story collection, War by Candlelight. Of him, Woodruff says,

Alarcon sees life as a process of constant internal and external movement. His characters are all between places, between friends, between lovers, between governments, between ideals.

Alarcon reads a brief excerpt, and talks about the inspiration behind this particular book, and behind his work in general. He is more interested in places like Lima, a tumultuous and chaotic city where characters like his collide, than there in places like Birmingham, Alabama, where he grew up, and where life is “altogether pleasant.”

Ursula Lindsey goes in search of the real-life Yacoubian building, where Alaa Al-Aswany’s best-selling novel, The Yacoubian Building, is set.

For the actual residents of the Yacoubian, all this [media hype] translates into much unwanted attention. The novel’s blunt depiction of the sexual and financial exploitation to which its characters subject each other reflects badly on its real-life counterparts, they say.

“People call it the building of homosexuality, of prostitution,” says Edward Kamil, one of the building’s administrators. “Not the Yacoubian building. There are characters in the book who have the same name as real people. It’s a novel but it deals with real people and a real place.’

You know where this is headed, don’t you? Let’s just say the lawyers are really happy. It annoys me how this sort of thing happens whenever a book does well. Some individuals get all cranky and start looking for similarities with real life. Take a deep breath, people, and repeat after me, “It’s fiction! It’s ficton!”

I haven’t been linking to all the Jonathan Safran Foer press that much, mostly because all the brouhaha bores me to tears but I did actually read this profile in the Financial Times (of all places). In it, Foer says that the “meanest reviews” he’s gotten for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in the U.S. were by authors whose novels don’t have an audience. “I would never say that to them,” he says, “but it’s an indisputable fact.” Might not be such a great idea to tell a journalist about it, then.

The New York Times pairs up a graphic novella set in Tehran, Iran (Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries) with an erotic novel set in Tangier, Morocco (the pseudonymous Nedjma’s The Almond.) The article is even titled Dreams of Trespass. (Get it?)

The review is favorable to both books, and I certainly agree with Sophie Harrison’s positive assessment of Embroideries. I have my own reservations about Nedjma’s book, but I’ll probably check out The Almond, too.

Leila Aboulela’s new novel, Minaret, is reviewed over at the Guardian. (The book will be released by Grove/Atlantic, I think, in the fall.)

During the past half dozen years, a new genre of contemporary English fiction seems to have emerged in the form of a series of novels by Muslim writers that explore the fault lines between various Islamic cultures and the way of life flourishing in the US and western Europe.

The authors do not set out to “explain” or satirise Islam from a western perspective, and they avoid the cute and ingratiating tone that has come to characterise popular narratives about identity and the clash of cultures in Britain. Instead, they write from inside the experience of growing up and living with a network of customs and beliefs, which have themselves been subject to dramatic and far-reaching changes in the 20th century.

Leila Aboulela’s second novel, Minaret, marks her out as one of the most distinguished of this new wave.

The rest of the review is equally glowing. I can’t wait to read it.

Thanks to David F. for the link.