Category: literary life

This year’s Orange Prize has gone to Lionel Shriver for We Need To Talk About Kevin. The Scotsman has a report, calling the novel controversial. (It’s about a career woman who has a child but then decides she doesn’t love it.)

Shriver’s heroine, Eva, comes to loathe her son, Kevin, who grows up to be a spiteful and cruel little boy.

She blames him both for the loss of her career and the souring of her previously perfect marriage.

Shortly before his 16th birthday Kevin murders nine people in a Columbine-style high school massacre.

The novel takes the form of letters from Eva to her estranged husband in which she examines whether her lack of maternal love turned her son into a killer.

Shriver gets to take home the 30,000 prize. I didn’t realize it was that much money. Sheesh. The Independent has its own report, in which the journalist compares the book to Vernon God Little. Says Shriver, “School-shooting books wasn’t a genre when I started it.”

Ms Shriver, whose book had been rejected by 30 British publishers before being accepted by the small independent Serpent’s Tail, said she was overwhelmed.

Producing notes that she said were marked “acceptance speech for Orange Prize, potentially humiliating in retrospect,” she said the last prize she had won was an architectural commentary on her school cafeteria when she was seven years old. “That’s not just a joke, from which you may infer that I have had a number of very lean and hard years.”

Here’s another trend piece about Iranian writers (you know the kind), but at least this one focuses on specifics: blogs and how they are opening up avenues of self expressions for young Iranians. The piece is essentially a review of the pseudonymous Nasrin Alavi’s new book We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs, but it places in the context of Iranian society today, and it’s a worthwhile read. Here’s a snippet:

Some of the bloggers’ language is very tough: ‘I s— on the whole of Hezbollah.’ Some is deeply evocative: ‘Have you ever been forced into exile? Has it ever happened that you just can’t get the pattern of those tiles in your Mother’s kitchen out of your head (for three nights in a row), but you just cannot remember the color? Has it ever come about that you call your Mother up from far away and ask her to describe the color of those tiles at which you both uncontrollably sob?’ Many Iranian women write with brilliant bitterness from their anonymity, and about it. ‘In the obituary columns instead of my picture, they place a picture of a rose,’ writes one. ‘[Because] the image of a woman can ensnare a man.’

I haven’t yet gotten my hands on Specimen Days, the new novel by Michael Cunningham, but Slate has a review, and it’s making me a little apprehensive.

In 2003, Cunningham told an interviewer, “What I must not do is write ‘The Hours’ again.” But Specimen Days, his first novel since the Pulitzer, looks an awful lot like The Hours. Like its predecessor, it recounts three stories set in three different eras, all of which are presided over by a literary genius one who can be found just a little to the left of Woolf on the library shelf: Walt Whitman. But there is one notable difference between the two books. Most of what Cunningham did well in The Hours he has done poorly in Specimen Days. The tension between Whitman’s audacious, renegade transcendentalism and Cunningham’s orthodox redemption-seeking makes Specimen Days a flawed book, at once underimagined and overdetermined. And it prompts larger questions about the project of invoking lost masters. In theory such borrowing is a source of rich inspiration, but in Cunningham’s second novel it comes across as a symptom of novelistic anxiety about the status of high literature in an information-obsessed society.

MG reader and friend Max alerts us to Bidoun, a new, Dubai-based magazine of arts and culture. (And by ‘new,’ I mean it’s been around since 2003, and I only found out about it last week.) The summer 2005 issue includes a cool essay about the name ‘Mohammed’ having entered the list of the top 20 most popular boys’ names in the U.K., several articles on architecture, and two book reviews, but those are not available online, unfortunately.

Randa Jarrar explains her new obsession: Patricia Highsmith.

So, once or twice a year, I foster a mini-obsession with a female writer who is, usually, fabulous, talented, queerish, and dead (for those of you who would view this as sublimation or my way of feeling safe in a relationship, you’re geniuses! Call me).

Last winter, it was Anais Nin (following a brief but doomed affair with Gertrude Stein). Last Summer, Iris Murdoch. Before that, it was Mary McCarthy. I could go on and on.

This summer, it’s Patricia Highsmith. I am reading The Price of Salt, her “lesbians on the road/run” novel, and the controversial The Tremor of Forgery, which Graham Greene thought was her finest, and which is set in Tunisia.

Read the rest here.

Several readers have emailed to ask me about Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, and whether it lives up to the hype surrounding it (best-selling novel in the Arab world, major motion picture, paperback rights to Harper Collins, etc.), but I haven’t yet gotten to the novel. In the meantime, here’s a Cairene blogger’s take on it.