Category: literary life

Zakes Mda has written a lovely piece for the Boston Review about his writing process, specifically his approach to realism and characterization. He discusses J.M. Coetzee’s incredible novel Waiting for the Barbarians, placing it in the context of apartheid-era South African fiction, which was often starkly realistic:

What others saw as a failure to represent lived experience appeared to me—I was then living in exile—as a refreshing way to re-imagine South Africa and transcend the repetition of the horrors reported every day in newspapers. Waiting for the Barbarians addressed the brutality of colonialism in a timeless manner and extended the borders of “empire” far beyond those of South Africa: to the rest of Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. Springing from the particular circumstances of South Africa, it spoke to a universe in which the state became increasingly terroristic in its defense of imperial values. The timelessness was rendered all the more striking to me when one of my students at Ohio University asked if the novel was written after 9/11.

He also describes how Coetzee’s attention to characterization helped him to see the need to create emotionally and intellectually complex South African characters:

In 1984 my play, The Road, won the Christina Crawford Award of what was then called the American Theater Association and was read on stage at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco. Theater educators and scouts gathered and offered their critiques. I was taken aback by one particular comment: according to one critic, the Afrikaner character was a thorough scoundrel without a single redeeming feature. (…)The play is highly allegorical, for allegory is the mode of oral literature and folklore in that part of the world. South African theater was allegorical long before Coetzee. Its humor was in its absurdity, which was largely the absurdity of the Afrikaner character and everything he stood for. So, what more did the San Francisco critic want from it? What redeeming attribute could an Afrikaner character possibly have, especially after oppressing me for more than three hundred years?

Of course, real people are never as sharply contrasted as some heroes and villains in fiction, and Mda had to learn to create more complex Afrikaner characters.

Related: On Zakes Mda’s novel Cion for The Nation .

The New York Times Book Review asked a few poets and novelists which books they would recommend for the three presidential candidates. I think my favorite suggestions are those given by Lorrie Moore:

For Obama: “The Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James. A virtuous orphan is plotted against by a charming, ruthless couple the orphan once trusted and admired.

For Clinton: “Macbeth,” by William Shakespeare. The timeless tale of how untethered ambition and early predictions may carry a large price tag.

For McCain: “Tales From the Brothers Grimm.” In case more are needed.

Meanwhile, Gore Vidal contributes a typically Vidalian recommendation: “I can only answer in the negative: I want them not to read The New York Times, while subscribing to The Financial Times.”

I have been looking forward to the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road ever since I heard that Viggo Mortensen would play the role of the father. Yesterday the New York Times‘ Charles McGrath had a report from the set on the challenges of filming the post-apocalyptic world that McCarthy imagined.

Ahdaf Soueif and Ian Jack have written brief essays for the Guardian about their participation in the Palestine Literary Festival, which took them, along with Esther Freud, Claire Messud, Pankaj Mishra, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Roddy Doyle and others, to the cities of Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Bethlehem.

I really enjoyed David Shaftel’s essay on how V.S. Naipaul is read and interpreted in his native Trinidad. The piece appeared last Sunday in the New York Times Book Review, but, between my novel and my teaching, it’s taking me several days to catch up on reading. Here is the opening paragraph:

If the measure of a writer’s success is the ire he provokes, then V. S. Naipaul is a spectacular success in Trinidad. In this island nation of just over a million people, there is a widespread perception that he has jilted his homeland through unflattering portraits in his books and a string of cutting remarks over the years. “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies,” Naipaul wrote in “The Middle Passage” (1962) — the first sign that he wasn’t going to play the proud native son. A fresher wound came in 2001, when Naipaul omitted any mention of Trinidad from his initial press release after winning the Nobel Prize, which many here saw as a deliberate rebuff. And last year, during a visit sponsored by the University of the West Indies, Naipaul more than lived up to his reputation for cantankerousness, prompting disapproving press coverage after he snapped at a group of students at a Hindu girls’ high school.

Despite the cantankerousness, I’d say it’s still a semi-sympathetic portrait of Naipaul.

From a brief piece in the London Review of Books on immigration detention centers:

Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea living in Brooklyn, is one of 71 detainees to have died in the last four years in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An illegal immigrant confined to a detention centre after his green card application was rejected, Bah died after a fall that no one seems to have witnessed. ICE, which was set up by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, is responsible for the detention of a staggering number of people: 311,213 last year, a million since 2004. They are held in prisons in which, according to Mark Dow, the author of American Gulag (2005), ‘extreme forms of physical abuse are not just aberrations.’ The centre where Bah was detained is managed by Corrections Corporation of America, a firm set up in 1983 in Nashville by a group of investors that included a former chairman of Tennessee’s Republican Party. A pioneer in running private prisons, it has also been quick to specialise in immigrant detention, the fastest growing branch of the incarceration business.

CCA describes itself as the ‘nation’s largest provider of outsourced corrections management’, with 70,000 inmates and 16,000 staff. Its website speaks proudly of ‘similarities in mission and structure’ with the US army and makes a special appeal to veterans in search of work: ‘How will you make the transition from military to civilian life? CCA features a paramilitary structure: a highly refined chain of command, and policies and procedures that dictate facility operations.’

Things are similarly bleak for immigrants and refugees in the UK, as Adam Shatz explains.