New LRB
The new issue of the London Review of Books is up online. It includes Frank Kermode’s review of Edward Said’s book on late style, though that piece is available to subscribers only.
The new issue of the London Review of Books is up online. It includes Frank Kermode’s review of Edward Said’s book on late style, though that piece is available to subscribers only.
Carl Phillips has received a $25,000 fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Many congratulations.
(via.)
Novelist and activist Edwidge Danticat has a lovely opinion piece in the Washington Post about torture:
For many who remember — just as these women do, and my own parents do — what it means to live under a dictatorial regime, a regime in which citizens must leave work or school to witness public executions, torture is not just an individual affliction but a communal one. And now, when political leaders in the United States are asking us as a society to consider not only the legal and moral ramifications of torture but its effectiveness, we are brought closer to these regimes than we may think. If we are part of all that has touched us, as Alfred Tennyson wrote, then we are all endorsers of torture when it is done in our name.
Torture aims for a single goal — obtaining information — but it achieves a slew of others.
The piece is quite au point, considering the fact that the Cheney-McCain deal has essentially given Bush free reign to define what torture is.
Predictably, Elif Shafak has been acquitted of the charge that she had “insulted Turkishness” in her most recent novel, Father and Bastard. Shafak was not present at her trial–she delivered her first child on Saturday. The name of that baby girl is Sheherazad. A wise choice, and one that prosecutors ought to pay attention to. Their intimidations will not stop the woman from telling stories.
Article 301, which made the charges against Shafak possible, is still in the books, although there is a tiny hope that the government might reform its ways:
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also welcomed the verdict and signalled that the government would consider amending Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code. It envisages up to three years in jail for “denigrating Turkish national identity”.
“The ruling party and the opposition can sit down together again to discuss this issue as laws are not eternal,” Anatolia news agency quoted Mr Erdogan as saying.
So it’s wait and see at this point.
(Thanks to N. and S. for the link.)
One of the fall 2006 books I was most excited about is Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Set in the 1960s, during the aborted attempt to set up an independent state in Biafra, the book tells the story of three characters whose loyalties to their ideas, ideals, and one another, are tested. There’s thirteen-year-old Ugwu, a houseboy for a university professor, Olanna, the professor’s mistress; and Richard, an Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s twin sister. You can read some of the early (and mostly excellent) reviews of the book: Janet Maslin in the New York Times, Martin Rubin in the San Francisco Chronicle, Merle Rubin in the L.A. Times.
Some related links:
Adichie’s website.
Debbie Elliot’s interview with Adichie on NPR.
Adichie writes about the books that have influenced her in the Guardian.
Last year, when the Turkish government’s case against novelist Orhan Pamuk was thrown out of court on a technicality, many had hoped that Article 301–the law that makes it illegal to “insult Turkishness,” whatever that means–would also be purged from the penal code. It has not.
Now it is the turn of novelist Elif Shafak to go on trial for something she has written, and which has irked the establishment. What makes her case even more remarkable is that, this time, the supposed “insult to Turkishness” comes from a fictional character in one of her novels, Father and Bastard (English title: The Bastard of Istanbul.) The character speaks about the (otherwise well-documented) genocide of Armenians by Turks in 1915, and apparently it is illegal to imagine such a scene in a novel. Shafak’s trial opens today in Istanbul. It also bears mention that the writer was pregnant during all these stressful weeks; she delivered just five days ago, and now she must attend the trial against her.
Shafak is only one among many (eighteen, to be precise) writers and journalists who are being harrassed via Article 301. You can read more about the cases here.