Category: literary life

For those of you who live in New York: The NBCC will be hosting a panel about representations of Islam tonight. The speakers are author and historian Tariq Ali and poet and translator Eliot Weinberger, which should be quite interesting. The discussion will be moderated by Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. The event takes place at 7 pm at McNally/Robinson Bookstore (Mulberry and Prince Street in SoHo.) For more information, call (212) 274-1160. And then email me and let me know how it went.

The Literary Saloon (one my favorite blogs) reports that the University of Rouen now offers a full transcript of the manuscript for Madame Bovary. You can see Flaubert’s text as he labored over it: words crossed out, verbs changed; descriptions refined. And you can see various drafts, the final draft, the copy edited version, and the published text of 1873. It’s really quite something.

Over at the Nation, Maria Margaronis has an excellent piece of commentary on Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel award:

“Pamuk’s Nobel: Deciphering the Code of Silence in Ankara,” read the headline in the Turkish tabloid Hurriyet–a title that could refer equally to a postmodernist reading of Orhan Pamuk’s work, an account of intrigues among Ottoman pashas or a news story about the Turkish president’s failure to congratulate the laureate. Since the Turkish novelist won the Nobel Prize for Literature, life has strangely come to resemble one of his fictions. On the day the prize was announced the French national assembly passed a bill making it an offense to deny the Armenian genocide, so that a person can now be prosecuted in France for denying something that it is a crime to assert in Turkey.

You can read it all here. In other news, the Literary Saloon reports that Pamuk has cancelled his appearance at the University of Minnesota, where he was due to give the Ohanessian lecture.

The Chronicle reports that the University of Nebraska Press has re-issued Henri Alleg’s The Question, his memoir of torture at the hands of French police during the occupation of Algeria.

French citizens had known vaguely that their colonial authorities were torturing dissidents and suspected terrorists in Algeria, but Mr. Alleg’s essay made that knowledge much more vivid. The French government quickly banned the book’s sale — which, of course, only added to the public frenzy. (The book was legalized in France only after the Algerian war ended, in 1962.)

The Question remains a political touchstone in France, and Mr. Alleg, who is still active in his mid-80s, is a familiar commentator there on the past crimes of French colonialism. But in the English-speaking world, the book has been largely forgotten.

This new edition includes an afterword by Alleg in which he draws comparisons with the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

There’s obviously lots and lots of coverage of Orhan Pamuk now that he has won the Nobel Prize for literature. You can read Robert McCrum’s anecdote of meeting the then “unknown Turkish novelist” in 1991. Or the interview with Malcolm Jones in Newsweek, where Pamuk describes his development as a writer. Or his reaction to the new French law that makes it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide.

Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, who directed The Battle of Algiers, has passed on, aged 86. The photo below is from the scene in which Colonel Mathieu enters the city with his troops, in order to quell the rebellion. (In real life, the actor Jean Martin staunchly opposed French occupation of Algeria. )