Category: literary life

Pindeldyboz has announced that it will cease publication of its print magazine on December 10, 2007. They’re having a party in New York to celebrate the final issue. Check it out.

I have been battling with every ounce of my strength the urge to respond to Martin Amis’s latest comments on Muslims. I have succumbed to that urge before, mind you, but not this time. Instead, I offer you, gentle reader, a quote from James Baldwin.

[I]ndeed, within this web of lust and fury, black and white can only thrust and counter-thrust, long for each other’s slow, exquisite death; death by torture, acid knives and burning; the thrust, the counter-thrust, the longing making the heavier that cloud which blinds and suffocates them both, so that they go down into the pit together. Thus has the cage betrayed us all, this moment, our life, turned to nothing through our terrible attempts to insure it. For Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria, bequeathed to him at birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult–that is, accept it.

Excerpted from “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” reprinted in Notes of a Native Son.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Words Without Borders has asked me to lead a book club discussion of Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King. My first post is already up on their site. Here’s how it starts:

When my friend Mark Sarvas introduced his book club discussion of Sándor Márai’s The Rebels, he wrote that “as an American of Hungarian descent, taking on Márai was an obvious and overdue choice for me.” I confess to a very similar bias in my own choice. When I was presented with a list of books to pick from, I naturally gravitated to a novel by a fellow African, in this case Camara Laye, whose Radiance of the King I had not read before. Generally speaking, African authors who write in French, or indeed in any of the native languages of Africa such as Gikuyu or Berber or Swahili, are not nearly as known or read in the United States as those who write in English. So the opportunity to discuss Camara Laye was also an opportunity for me to invite readers to consider a different African book and a different African author than those with whom they may already be familiar.

Camara Laye was born in 1928 in Kouroussa, a small village of Guinea, which at that time was under French occupation. He attended Qur’anic school as well as elementary school in his village, but moved to Conakry, the capital, in order to continue his education. In 1947, he moved to Paris to attend engineering school. His experience of double dislocation—from his village to the city, from Guinea to France—appears to have inspired in him a deep nostalgia for home. His first novel, the semi-autobiographical L’Enfant noir (usually translated as The Dark Child), was published in 1953, and was met with a mixture of admiration and hostility: Admiration for Camara’s storytelling skills, and hostility for his depiction of an idyllic village childhood at a time when the country was under colonial rule. These reactions remind me of those reserved for Moroccan novelist Ahmed Sefroui’s La Boîte à merveilles, published in 1954, and which also depicted a happy childhood under/despite French rule. Some scholars today may consider both novels ethnographic works, while others may emphasize the tribute they pay to ways of life later disrupted by French rule.

You can visit the book club area for the rest of this entry, and to post some comments.

Words Without Borders, the wonderful organization that brings you literature in translation, recently started an online book club. I’ve linked before to the conversations: Mark Sarvas discussing Sándor Márai’s The Rebels and Michael Orthofer talking about Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins.

I mention all of this again because, next month, I will be doing the book club discussion on Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King, translated from the French by James Kirkup. If you’re interested, why not get the book at your local bookstore, or borrow it from your library? You have a couple of weeks before the conversation starts. I haven’t read the novel yet myself–I am taking it with me when I go on vacation later this week, and will savor it then. Once I have something up on the WWB website, I’ll mention it in this space as well, so you can take part in the conversation.

The new issue of Bookforum is now available, and it includes a review by Siddhartha Deb of J.M. Coetzee’s new novel Diary of a Bad Year. In the U.K., where the book first appeared, the reviews have been mixed, but this early piece here in the U.S. is just lovely. Here is its concluding paragraph:

The books have all been short, the language deceptively simple, but Coetzee’s recurrent themes have been no less than the vital signs of a culture, one possibly in its death throes. Diary of a Bad Year may be his most successful diagnosis yet of what we are suffering from, one that even offers hope in the form of resistance, critical thought, and the odd, imperfect humanity that emerges in the story of Anya and Señor C. In other writers, such hope would appear trite, but we know that Coetzee is no sentimentalist. His humanism has always been hard-won, wrested from those early lessons in authoritarianism and opposition, and this brilliant novel shows how much better prepared Coetzee is than many Western writers to come to terms with our new age.

When I was in Europe earlier this fall I was frustrated to see that the Italian translation of the novel was already published while we here in the U.S. had to wait until January. Another six weeks to go!

In the Financial Times, Simon Kuper reviews four recent books that purport to show that Europe is under attack from Islam and/or Muslims: Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept, Walter Laqueur’s The Last Days of Europe, Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan, and Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia. Here is Kuper’s intro:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written in the 1890s, possibly by the Russian-French journalist Matthieu Golovinski, and spread by the Tsarist secret police. A forgery, it claimed to be the manual of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.

Bat Ye’or, author of the little-read but influential book Eurabia, repeatedly mentions the Protocols. Well she might, because Eurabia has been described as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in reverse. Bat Ye’or is Hebrew for ”daughter of the Nile”, the pseudonym of a woman who fled Egypt as a Jew in 1957 and now lives in Switzerland. In Eurabia, she purports to reveal an Arab-European conspiracy to rule the world.

Though ludicrous, Eurabia became the spiritual mother of a genre. Ye’or’s genius was to bridge two waves of anti-European books: those of 2002-03, which said Europe had gone anti-Semitic again, and those of 2006-07, which say Europe is being conquered by Muslims.

The four books here provide a fair summary of the ”Eurabia” genre. False as they are, their existence reveals something about the geopolitical moment.

And then he proceeds to deconstruct all these books’ claims. You can read the full article here.