Category: literary life

I need to read an article from the archives of the New York Review of Books, but can’t access it. Anyone here a subscriber? Please email me. Got it. Thanks.

What a treat. A new short story by Edward P. Jones in the New Yorker: “Bad Neighbors.”

Yesterday, I expressed my dismay at the fact that the supposed “Campaign Against the Filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane,” or whatever the hell it was called, was getting too much attention, to the detriment of those who didn’t care about it one bit. Well, the campaign’s march on Sunday “drew 2 women and 70 older men,” the Guardian reports, and “threats of violence and book-burning failed to materialise.”

“We cannot allow small numbers of ‘offended’ traditionalists the power of censorship,” agreed Appignanesi. “Mr Salique’s campaign, the media and the police’s willingness to accept him as a representative, are shaming to the proud history of Brick Lane, which has been home to generations of immigrants from many countries, among them some of Britain’s leading writers and artists.”

Maybe next time the media will ask who the “community leaders” represent before giving their words such weight.

Deborah Solomon interviews Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua for the New York Times:

Let’s talk about your latest novel, “A Woman in Jerusalem,” which comes out in this country in a few weeks.
This is the most important thing! Meaning, I would like to speak not about the Hezbollah but my novel.

Isn’t politics more important than your own career?
Of course, but about my novel I can speak something more accurate, more intimate and more true than I can about Hezbollah.

(via.)

As you may recall, Professor Fouad Ajami found time from his visits to the White House to write another book about the Middle East. It’s called The Foreigner’s Gift, and it’s been reviewed in the NYT by Noah Feldman, who himself was involved with the ill-fated Iraqi adventure. He was hired by the Provisional Authority as a consultant to help draft the new Iraqi Constitution–you know, the piece of paper that says that no law in Iraq can contradict principles of Sharia? Anyway, here is Feldman on Ajami:

Few other Americans have Ajami’s distinctive qualifications for reflecting on the Iraq war. Born to a Shiite family in Lebanon, he has written several important books about Middle Eastern political culture, including a recognized classic on the Lebanese Shiites, “The Vanished Imam.” He supported the removal of Saddam Hussein, and his extraordinary level of access in Washington is reflected in “The Foreigner’s Gift,” which recounts many conversations he had in Iraq while shadowing American officials or traveling with close American allies like Chalabi. Respected by politicians who disdain most academics, and excoriated by antiwar academics who detest the present government, Ajami richly deserves the attention of both camps.

More than just “supporting the removal of Saddam Hussein,” Ajami was one of those scholars (Bernard Lewis, Kanan Makiya, et al.) who predicted (in fact, told the administration) that the Americans would be greeted with “sweets and flowers.” One hundred thousand deaths and a civil war later, why would anyone lend credence to his analysis of Iraq?? But, hey, what do I know–I’m just a poor Arab immigrant. And a woman, at that. I think I’m supposed to be silent or submissive or something.

Feldman is on more solid ground in his criticism of Peter Galbraith’s The End of Iraq, in which the question of the Kurds (and an independent Kurdistan) is discussed. Here, Feldman raises some serious and pragmatic questions to the proposal:

The chief problem with the “break Iraq in two” option is that creating an independent Kurdistan does absolutely nothing to address the present violence in the country. It might be nice for the Kurds, especially if the United States gave them the Kirkuk oil field and then permanently stationed large numbers of troops in Kurdistan to protect it. But Kurdistan is mostly peaceful, and at present Kurds are not fighting Arabs in Iraq, except to some small degree around disputed Kirkuk itself. The violence in Iraq is predominantly Sunni-Shiite; and the United States desperately needs the stabilizing third force of the Kurds in the national leadership and the armed forces to have any hope at all of damping it down. To the contrary, breaking off Kurdistan would create a new violent front, because a Sunni ministate could never survive without a share of Kirkuk’s oil, and so Sunni insurgents would have to turn their attentions to the Kurds. This is to say nothing of the continuing concerns of Turkey about an independent Kurdistan, or the possibility of Turkish encroachment having to be confronted by American forces.

To this list one might also add the domino effect an independent Kurdistan could have for other Kurdish minorities in Syria and Iran. Oy. Is your head spinning yet?

There is an excellent opinion piece by Orhan Pamuk in the IHT, addressing a question that comes up, again and again, at readings: ‘Who do you write for?’*

For the last 30 years – since I first became a writer – this is the question I’ve heard most often from both readers and journalists. Their motives depend on the time and the place, as do the things they wish to know. But they all use the same suspicious, supercilious tone of voice.

In the mid-’70s, when I first decided to become a novelist, the question reflected the widely held philistine view that art and literature were luxuries in a poor non-Western country troubled by premodern problems.

There was also the suggestion that someone “as educated and cultivated as yourself” might serve the nation more usefully as a doctor fighting epidemics or an engineer building bridges.

Pamuk also addresses the perennial suggestion that writing for certain audiences automatically makes you ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic.’ Some great stuff. Read it.

*Relax, I know it should be ‘whom.’