The shelver at Seattle’s University Bookstore (“I am the shelver. I shelve books.”) has posted a photo he took at last week’s Bumbershoot festival of Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill, and, uh, me. Hmm. Someone needs to figure out how to use a digital camera.
David Friend’s Watching the World Change is a collection of photographs and commentary about iconic immages from the September 11 attacks. You can view a few of them here, and listen to an interview with him and some of the people who took the photos on NPR.
Novelists Elias Khouri and A.B. Yehoshua talk to NPR about the July/August war in Lebanon and Israel. Worth checking out.
Two reviews of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow appeared this weekend, and both were notable for engaging with the novel on its own terms. In the Washington Post, Aminatta Forna acknowledges didactic lapses in the novel, but she also points out that Ngugi’s work is read aloud in public spaces in Kenya, in the Gikuyu language. (Consistent with Ngugi’s stance for most of his career, the book was written in Gikuyu first; he then translated it into English.)
In the New York Times, Jeff Turrentine gently questions Ngugi’s claim that he wanted “to sum up Africa of the 20th century in the context of 2,000 years of world history.”
Given that Africa — where some 900 million people live in more than 50 different nations, each with its own history and culture — can hardly be treated as monolithic, one assumes Ngugi means to detect and tug at the common loose thread that has led to the unraveling of so many African states since they began claiming their independence after World War II.
And indeed it appears that’s what Ngugi is doing in the book.
Ian Buruma’s new book, Murder In Amsterdam, is a chronicle of the killing of Theo Van Gogh by a Dutch Islamist, and an examination of its effects on the political and social scene in the Netherlands. Christopher Caldwell’s review in the New York Times reveals some interesting details, but unfortunately also lapses in the usual ridiculous exaggerations one has come to expect:
Buruma interviews two charismatic reformers: van Gogh’s collaborator Hirsi Ali and the Iranian-born legal scholar Afshin Ellian. Both believe that nothing short of dragging Islam through the wringer of skepticism and ridicule, as Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers did Catholicism, will suffice to disarm potential militants like Bouyeri. But Buruma is skeptical. He suspects that many of those who invoke the Enlightenment are merely defending a conservative order. “Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church,” he writes, “while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.”
That is unfair. Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him. We need a much more flexible definition of the word “minority” in a world thus networked.
The vast majority of the “billion enemies” that Caldwell is talking about here have no clue who Ayaan Hirsi Ali is. She may be famous in the Netherlands, Somalia, and in conservative circles here in the States, but that does not mean she is elsewhere in the Muslim world. In addition, most of the “billion enemies” he imagines do not yet have ready access to the Internet (must one mention the higher priorities of food, clean water, and health care?) It is doubtless that Hirsi Ali has enemies, but claiming that she risks having 1 billion of them, i.e. the entire body of Muslims, is beyond ridiculous.
Hisham Matar, whose debut novel In The Country of Men, was recently longlisted for the Booker Prize, has a little vignette at the Guardian about a visit to Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo two years ago. An interesting excerpt:
I asked a question that immediately exposed me. I shouted in his ear: “How do you see writers such as myself, Arabs who write in English?” He said nothing and continued to look straight ahead. Feeling awkward in the silence I pressed on. “Do we belong to Arabic literature, or the literature of the language in which we write?” Words like “we”, “belong”, suddenly seemed weightless.
“A writer serves the language he writes in,” Mahfouz said unequivocally.
A few of the gathered nodded in agreement.
I felt annoyed at myself, at my naked soliciting of an embrace.
I have a forthcoming essay about this very question. More soon.