In late 2004, the Rev. Joseph Dantica, a Haitian refugee who had sought asylum in the States, died while in immigration services custody. His niece, the novelist Edwidge Danticat, has been trying to uncover the circumstances of his death ever since. Now, at last, there are some details about what happened to the pastor, in an AP story by Pauline Arrigalla.
Nell Freudenberger reviews Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue for The Nation:
If Brick Lane belonged stylistically to the nineteenth century, the new book jumps forward in time. Modernist in form (the epigraph is from T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday”), it explores the decidedly twenty-first-century obsession with what is foreign and what is local, and how the mysterious category of the “global” might break down that distinction.
Alentejo Blue takes place almost entirely in Mamarrosa, a village in Portugal’s south-central Alentejo region, known for its cork and olive trees. The village is either impossibly backward or heartbreakingly picturesque, depending on which character is observing it. The nine narrators include three natives of Mamarrosa, three expatriates and three tourists. All of the chapters are written in the third person (except for two); each character has his or her own chapter (except for one young couple, who share).
Freudenberger finds that reading the novel is a “little like hitchhiking through unfamiliar countryside: You become so involved in the driver’s story that you’re surprised each time one of the characters stops to let you off.”
Meanwhile, the filming of Ali’s first novel, Brick Lane, had to be moved outside the neighborhood itself, due to protests from goons who revendicate “the freedom to burn books.” Some freedom.
Last month, Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between was hailed as “a masterpiece” by Tom Bissell in the New York Times. But it looks like Stewart has another book out at the same time: The Prince of the Marshes, about his stint as governor of two provinces in Iraq, and it, too, gets a rave review from the paper of record. Busy guy.
I have just been told that there will be a rally in Portland for peace in the Middle East. Here are the details:
Rally for Peace
Sunday, July 30th
1 pm
Pioneer Courthouse Square
Portland
Be there!
This has been linked to on several blogs already: John Updike reviews Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s much-anticipated novel Wizard of the Crow. I haven’t yet read the book (it just arrived in the mail yesterday) and it may well be that it’s not any good, but I did want to excerpt from Updike’s usual nuggets of wisdom:
The novel’s frequent recourse to magic realism, in the course of what its own text admits may seem “too incredible a narrative of magic and greed,” would seem appropriate to a culture so susceptible to the claims of the supernatural.
Isn’t he priceless?
Marc Acito (How I Paid For College) explains the virtues of Portland Bohemianism, or PoBo, for short:
Unlike traditional bohemians, PoBos don’t necessarily live in self-induced poverty. Instead, PoBos opt for simplicity. Even downsizing empty-nesters paying too much in the Pearl are bohemian in their rejection of the sprawling, fuel-inefficient suburbanism of places such as Phoenix, a city that expands 1.2 acres an hour.
In the city that works, our artists and intellectuals do just that, free from the cutthroat competition of New York, the mendacious maneuvering of Los Angeles or the smug self-congratulation of San Francisco. We’re a humble bunch, content to create in our affordable houses and ride our bikes to the farmers market in our sensible footwear.
Read it all here.