Category: literary life

I would normally have been excited at the prospect of a new movie about Hannibal and the Punic wars, but then this article says that it will star Vin Diesel. Blah.

China, a nation of 1 billion people, has 900 literary magazines, only 90 of which manage to turn out some profit. The reasons, according to this symposium are that:

First, chief editors are appointed by governing bodies of magazines or some government officials. As a result, in most cases, seniority enjoys top priority in such personnel maneuvers and many retired officials who are ignorant of literature are given the posts of editor-in-chief. Second, some writers become editors-in-chief after they become prominent. Chief editors with such backgrounds are sometimes biased, narrow-minded or weak in managerial capability and tend to form charmed circles around them.

The Guardian has a piece on Achmat Dangor’s new novel, Bitter Fruit, loosely based on Dangor’s own family history.

The book is set at a time when euphoric illusions following the end of apartheid are being shattered as the country deals with unexpected economic realities and the Aids pandemic. Dangor chose to dramatise this fraught period through the story of another rape and its aftermath. Bitter Fruit starts with its chief male protagonist, Silas, noticing someone familiar in a shopping mall. The man turns out to be the Afrikaaner cop who 20 years ago had raped Silas’s black wife, Lydia, when the couple were detained for working for the ANC. The sighting unleashes a potent family drama: the couple’s carefully negotiated marriage starts to fall apart; their son, conceived in the rape, becomes a Muslim fundamentalist and an avenger every bit as committed as Dangor’s real grandfather; the family is torn apart in ways it could not have imagined – just as their country is.

Another one to add to the reading list.

How without feeling as addled as its hero to try to say something new about Don Quixote? About the work once singled out by the Nobel Institute as the greatest novel of all time? After imperishable tributes by Fielding, Sterne, Samuel Johnson, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Faulkner, Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Lukcs, Borges, Paz, Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera? The lowly academic hack in this case female, a plumpish Sanchita Panza, without donkey or wineskin or really much more than turista Spanish feels especially unqualified. And besides, who really cares?

Not sure what the “female” part has to do with it, but anyhow Terry Castle gives it a try: she reviews the new translation by Edith Grossman in the Atlantic.

Ken Kesey’s notebooks from his stint in jail for marijuana possession will be out in print soon, though the collection is incomplete because two of the notebooks were confiscated before Kesey’s release.

“[W]riting novels was part of the overall way [Kesey] manifested his creativity, but that was never the original plan. Everything he ever did had graphic visual art. His clothing. His rake and ax have painted handles. He was an artist. The floor of his living room is a gigantic mandala. He did that all the time. And he was good,” [Editor David Sanborn] says.

The article is worth a read, if only for the oddly conservative description of San Francisco ca. 1967 as a “freak show.”

Richard Perle, the loathsome advisor at the Defense Policy Board, wrote a novel (titled, predictably enough, Hard Line) which is now out of print. The Boston Globe‘s Mark Schone dug it up for review.

The glowering, caterpillar-browed Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, has long been known as the Prince of Darkness for his ber-hawkish views. He is also a gourmet chef. These days, when he isn’t devouring coq au vin at his vacation home in Provence, he’s serving on the Defense Policy Board, an influential civilian advisory panel to the Pentagon. Harvard professor Michael Waterman, the menschy hero of “Hard Line,” is also a right-wing, Frenchified foodie with a No. 2 position at Defense, a house in Chevy Chase and a wife whose name begins with L. In early 2001, the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann visited Perle at home and realized that the gurgling French stewpots in the lavishly appointed kitchen were straight out of the book.
What Lemann did not know at the time was just how realistic “Hard Line” would prove to be. The novel was meant as a roman clef of the Cold War. But it prefigures, in detail, the Bush administration’s rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

I’d love to get my hands on this book, actually, and find out what’s in store for the next few years of neo-con policy. For more a recent article on Richard Perle himself, you could start with this one by Seymour Hersch.