Category: literary life

What a delightful surprise: The amazing Pico Iyer reviews Orhan Pamuk’s new collection of essays for the New York Times. Here’s a brief excerpt:

“Other Colors” is too eagerly inclusive to make up the single-pointed, honed narrative that its author promises. Like the maximalist “Black Book” or “My Name Is Red,” it is more a fireworks display than a rounded sculpture (it’s no surprise that a favorite Pamuk character is the “encyclopedist ”). Yet what emerges powerfully, and often movingly, from it is Pamuk’s faith in writing as a “consolation” and refuge, “our only defense against life’s cruelties.” When he titles one major section in the book “My Books Are My Life,” he seems to be speaking both for the way that he has put almost all his adult life into his work (sitting in his room 10 hours every day and barely leaving Istanbul until he was 31 ), and for the fact that his shrine is his library of 12,000 books (in a culture that “views the nonreader as the norm”).

You can read the entire article here.

On the fourth anniversary of Edward Said’s passing, Randa Jarrar has posted a poem/appreciation she wrote for him. Here are the first two stanzas:

It’s been four years and a day.
I like the way you wrote about bellydancers,
Tahia Carioca, who couldn’t tell you how many men she’d married.
When you asked her,
She could only utter a shrill

Kteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!

And I love the way you wrote
about those who wrote badly about bellydancers,
Oriental feet and jingles
and finger cymbals.
Edward, I wanted to meet you, wanted to fete you,
to talk about lost houses and lost selves and bellydance
with you.
What else would we have talked about?

Kteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!

Read the poem in full here.

Jessica Valenti, Natasha Walter, Rebecca Walker, Julie Binder, Ariel Levy, and Joan Smith tell readers which books on feminism most marked them.

I just got Orhan Pamuk’s new collection of essays, Other Colors, and I am so excited about it, I can’t wait to dive into it. The review by Michael McGaha in this weekend’s SF Chronicle makes me look forward to it. It’s interesting, too, to read his comments about the translation, by Maureen Freely:

The best thing one can say about Freely’s translation is that it doesn’t read like a translation. If you didn’t know, you would never guess this book had originally been written in a foreign language. Freely’s approach to translation seems to be to think about the meaning of Pamuk’s Turkish and then rephrase the idea in English as she would have expressed it. For example, when Pamuk writes “from now on until the end of my life, I will never smoke a cigarette again,” Freely translates: “I’m never going to smoke again, ever.” The basic idea is there, and Freely’s sentence sounds more natural in English than Pamuk’s, yet something important is lost.

Sometimes her formulations seem to complicate things unnecessarily. When Pamuk writes, “Looking out the window was such a basic habit that when television did come to Turkey, people started looking at it as if they were looking out the window,” the aptly named Freely translates: “Looking out the window was such an important pastime that when television did finally come to Turkey, people acted the same way in front of their sets as they had in front of their windows.” In this case even the meaning seems somewhat distorted, and once again, the poetry of the original is lost. Why not let Pamuk be Pamuk?

You can read the article in full here.

From Peter Conrad’s Guardian review of a new biography of Rudolph Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh:

If he didn’t like a ballerina he was partnering, he ungallantly let her thud to the ground. Once, he dragged an uncooperative dancer across the floor by her necklace, grazing her throat; he fractured the jaw of a male colleague who annoyed him. He ripped up costumes, hurled Thermos flasks into mirrors, spat at photographers and kicked police cars. In a tizz at Zeffirelli’s chintzy villa, he hurled a wrought-iron chair at his host and pulled down a curtain rod with which he pounded some majolica pottery to smithereens. Expelled from the premises, he paused to shit on the steps like an indignant, incontinent dog.

There’s more here, too.

The UK Telegraph has published sales figures for this year’s shortlisted books. Kind of shocking.