Category: literary life
Tayeb Salih (whose Season of Migration to the North should, I think, be assigned reading whenever Heart of Darkness is studied) talks to Reuters about the state of Arabic literature.
“If you find a publisher who believes in Arab literature and takes a risk on it, not just publishing a few thousand books, you will find readers for it,” said the 76-year-old writer, who is married to a Scot and has lived much of his life in England.
“The Arab novel has reached a very high standard which is comparable to any standard, anywhere in the world. The fact that this is not recognised abroad is a matter either of criteria … or it is a lack of enthusiasm for foreign products,” he said.
Still, the Reuters guy can’t help but trot out those discredited numbers about readership in the Arab world. Sigh.
The April/May issue of Ruminator magazine is now up, and features contributions by writer-cum-gubernatorial-candidate Kinky Friedman, Jon Fasman, Harvey Pekar, Steve Almond, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. Lahiri’s piece is a reminiscence of her travels to India as a child, where her parents collected items for what she calls the “Food Suitcase.”
I am the daughter of former pirates, of a kind. Our loot included gold, silver, even a few precious gems. Mainly though, it was food, so much that throughout my childhood I was convinced my parents were running the equivalent of the ancient spice trade. They didn’t exactly plunder this food; they bought it in the bazaars of Calcutta, where my mother was born and to which we returned as a family every couple of years. The destination was Rhode Island, where we lived, and where, back in the Seventies, Indian groceries were next to impossible to come by.
Tom Reiss’ The Orientalist is reviewed in The Nation, but unlike the raves that have appeared in other major outlets, Daniel Lazare’s critical analysis takes into account both Reiss’s book and the book that started it all–Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino.
Nussimbaum is interesting as a case study, but is he really worth an entire book? Ultimately, the answer depends on our assessment of his literary worth. Reiss, who has clearly put an enormous amount of labor into this volume, writes that Nussimbaum’s dozen-plus works of nonfiction are still “readable” after all these years, while Ali and Nino remains “his one enduring masterpiece.” In an afterword to a recent edition by Anchor Books, Paul Theroux goes even further, comparing Ali and Nino to Madame Bovary, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote and Ulysses–“novels so full of information that they seem to define a people.”
This makes Nussimbaum seem very important indeed. But is such lofty praise warranted? Not by a long shot. Overwrought and melodramatic, Ali and Nino is a minor bit of exotica that in ordinary times would be no more than a curiosity but, after September 11, is deeply repellent. Imagine a young Osama bin Laden crossed with Rudolph Valentino, and you’ll get an idea of the kind of hero–and values–the novel celebrates. Nussimbaum presents Ali, an Azeri khan, or chieftain, as a noble son of the desert: brutal, passionate and imbued with an Al Qaeda-like contempt for Western ways. Thus a chemistry textbook, in his view, is “foolish stuff, invented by barbarians, to create the impression that they are civilized.” Women have “no more sense than an egg has hairs,” while European law is contemptible because it does not accord with the Koran.
Related posts:
The Orientalist: Excerpt, Reviews, Questions, Interview
The Orientalist Report
The Orientalist Review
The BBC has a profile of Israeli writer Etgar Keret, whose collection The Nimrod Flip-Out comes out in Britain in March (it’ll be re-issued here in the States by FSG.)
The stories are subtly subversive, hinting at the pressure-cooker situation in which Israelis live without ever descending into overt politics. Keret says that is intentional.
“I don’t want to represent the political reality, I want to show people who live in it,” he says.
“It’s like when you use a mobile phone, it affects the TV – it makes a noise. I want to talk about this noise, not the phone call.”
Keret tells the BBC journalist an anecdote I’d heard him say before, and which I find hilarious:
And he recently appeared at a reading in France with Arab writer Sayed Kashua – where he discovered they had similar worries about the event.
“I’m always afraid of events in France. There’s always some pointy-chinned woman who stands up at the end and says: ‘You’re a baby killer, your hands are covered with blood.’
“And Sayed said: ‘I always get some guy saying: ‘You’re all suicide bombers, you have blood on your hands.’
“So I saw this woman in the crowd, she was nervous the whole time, and I was thinking to myself, that she was the one.
“And as soon as we were finished speaking she stood up and said: ‘This whole time I have been confused. Which one of you is the Israeli writer and which is the Palestinian?'”
Cracks me up every time.
The April issue of The Atlantic has a cover story by David Foster Wallace, about political talk radio. You can get a small glimpse of it here, but you’ll have to buy the issue to really get an idea of the thing. (Color-coded notes and asides, anyone?)
The finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award have been announced. They are:
Thanks to the indefatigable Dan Wickett for the link.