Category: literary life

The latest issue of The Nation includes a very thoughtful review by Gary Younge of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani. Here, he addresses the much-talked about use of the ‘street vernacular’ in the novel:

At times this mix is playfully subversive–one character is told to “wake up, smell the masala tea”; Jas tells us Desi fathers will “drop you like a hot samosa.” But it can be jarring, too. Like Forest Whitaker fumbling to maintain his English accent for the duration of The Crying Game, Malkani puts unlikely middle-class words into the narrative voice of the supposedly streetwise Jas:

Regarding it as some kind a civic duty to educate others in this basic social etiquette, he continued kickin the white kid in the face, each kick carefully planted so he din’t get blood on his Nike Air Force Ones (the pair he’d bought even before Nelly released a track bout what wikid trainers they were).

It’s unclear how someone who thinks in terms of “civic duty” and “basic social etiquette” can move so easily to Nelly’s “wikid” sneakers; still, Malkani’s overall portrait of a hybridity of races, religions, ethnicities and globalized reference points is a welcome reflection of the everyday life of London’s youth.

You can read more here.

I’ve been hearing good things about Lawrence Wright’s new book The Looming Tower. Here’s an interview with him on NPR, in which he explains the influence of younger jihadis on the Web, the viral nature of their strategy, their “twenty-year master plan,” and why the current approach to fight them is inadequate.

It’s a shame that Hilary Mantel’s piece on Pankaj Mishra’s new book, Temptations of the West, is hidden behind subscription walls at the New York Review of Books. It’s a very interesting article that places the book in the context of Mishra’s earlier work, and I really enjoyed reading it, so I’ll share at least this paragraph from it:

This is a book written for the West, by a man with a stake in two worlds, who moves through languages—a skill of which Mishra makes little—and who travels uneasily, so that most of us can stay at home. For the West it makes bitter reading. It explores a legacy of bungling and bad faith, of cultural incomprehension and pragmatic exploitation, and the export of two ideas—the idea of the nation-state and the idea of democracy— which have arrived in the East in a deteriorated and contaminating condition. Looking at modern India, with its wildly uneven distribution of wealth, its high-tech dreams existing beside the most debased squalor, the West is inclined to say, “At least we are not responsible for the caste system.” But are those white hands quite clean? How far is modern Hinduism an “Empire product”? How far is it a synthesized organism, bred to rule, bred to be capable of taking over the reins of power when the British quit?

Mishra argues that during the years of British rule a Hindu elite embraced a notion of its own history created at least in part by Western Orientalists. This vision looked back to a pre-Islamic India, and excused its most stomach-turning practices—widow-burning, for instance—as a reaction to the cruelties of Muslim rule. What this elite took from the imperialists was “the European idea of the nation—a cohesive community with a common history, culture, values, and sense of purpose—which for many other colonized peoples appeared a way of duplicating the success of the powerful, all-conquering West.”

More here.

More rave reviews for Edward P. Jones’s new collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children. Writing in the Boston Globe, John Freeman argues that

Like William Trevor and Alice Munro, Jones compresses whole novels into these stories. Each new paragraph requires a family tree. This almost biblical layering may slow momentum, but it is the real story here: how a generation passes its fears and wisdom and beliefs on to the next, how a chink in that transfer is likened to death.

Meanwhile, in a review for the San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman looks at faith in Jones’s work:

Throughout these stories it is hard not to notice Jones’ affinity for Catholicism, but it is an ordinary, almost secular type of belief where one finds in ritual a comfortable friend, as opposed to the damning guilt of a Flannery O’Connor or the equally damning lack of repentance of a Graham Greene. What he shares with these two great Catholic writers, apart from a confident technical literary prowess, is the ability to work wonders with human emotion through the lens of moral ambiguity.

The superlative comparisons are unlikely to stop there, and I hope you’ll consider reading the book.

Since so many obits and articles on Naguib Mahfouz start out by mentioning that he was “the only Arab to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature,” I think it’s worthwhile to quote from Issandr El Amrani‘s piece at the Guardian Comment Is Free blog:

The life of the 1988 Nobel prize laureate – he was the only Arabic-language writer ever to get one, which tells you more about the Nobel prize than it tells you about Arabic literature – spanned most of the past century.

Indeed. The Nobel did not see fit to recognize all the other greats: Khalil Gibran, Abdulrahman Munif, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Taha Husayn, Tawfiq Al-Hakim, and on and on.

Also in the Guardian, an obit on Mahfouz by the translator Denys Johnson-Davies, who worked on a couple of Mahfouz’s books, as well as on Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, among many other Arabic novels.

I was asked to write a piece for the Nation magazine about the passing of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz. Here’s the first paragraph:

The story of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz is the story of modern Egypt itself. Born in 1911 in the Gamaliya district of Cairo, Mahfouz witnessed the last days of British colonial rule and Ottoman influence, the nationalist struggle of Saad Zaghloul, the reigns of King Fuad and King Farouq, the military coup of 1952, the establishment of the republic, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s takeover in 1954, the Suez Canal crisis, the rule of Anwar al-Sadat, the Camp David accords of 1978 and finally the brutal dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

You can read it all here.