Category: literary life

Deserved Honor

I’m delighted to hear, via the blog of the NBCC, that the National Book Foundation will honor Maxine Hong Kingston with its 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. One of the books that has marked me most is Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (I first came across it as an undergraduate student at Mohammed-V). I still have my old copy, most of it underlined or filled with comments. And nowadays I even teach portions of it in my creative nonfiction classes. It’s so nice to see her work recognized.




Booker 2008 Longlist

The longlist for the Booker Prize for 2008 has been announced.  It includes:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
From A to X by John Berger
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

The only one I’ve read so far is Rushdie’s Enchantress. I also have Netherland, and hope to get to it in the next week or two.



New Robinson

Reviews for Fall books are starting to come in.  One of the novels I’m most looking forward to reading is Marilynne Robinson’s Home. It was reviewed by Emily Barton in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times.

Unlike novels that delight in plot twists and structural play, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gilead” is seemingly straightforward and free of pyrotechnics. Instead, the novel takes its sweet, molasses-slow time, and in the process achieves depths of pathos and empathy rarely seen in contemporary fiction. What drives “Gilead” is the voice of its protagonist, the Rev. John Ames: his prose flexible and spare, steeped in Scripture and the writings of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. Yet Ames also has an abiding tenderness for the world; when he sees his son blowing soap bubbles, he describes one as floating “past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst.”

So little happens, in an outward sense, that Robinson barely divides “Gilead” into chapters. (There are two.) But events resonate so profoundly, they almost cannot be contained within the book. This is perhaps part of why Robinson has chosen to revisit certain scenes in her new novel, “Home,” this time writing from the perspective of Glory Boughton, one of “Gilead’s” minor characters. Yet this co-quel has a beauty all its own.

The rest of the piece is available online.



New Birth

NPR’s Gregory Feifer files a short piece about what he calls a ‘literary renaissance’ in Russia.  Readers have not been seduced by the availability of commercial literature after the fall of the Soviet Union and, in fact, are drawn to serious literature now, under Putin’s repressive regime.

Kind of puts me in mind of that line by Harry Lime in The Third Man: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”




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