The latest issue of the London Review of Books is now available. There’s a piece by Elias Khoury, translated by Peter Clark, about the invasion of Lebanon, an essay by Amit Chaudhuri on Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, and a review by Adam Shatz of Michel Warschawski’s memoir, On The Border. (This last one is only available to subscribers, unfortunately.)
Melissa Meltzer reviews Faïza Guène’s debut novel Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, finding it “remarkable.”
The July/August issue of the Boston Review is now available, with a great short story by Jennie Berner, an appreciation of R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days by Jhumpa Lahiri, and a review of Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place by poet G.C. Waldrep. Check it out. (Oh, and a tip: Avoid the public-opinion feature. It will depress you.)
Over at the Guardian blog Natasha Walter examines the work of several recent novelists who have attempted to get into the mind of terrorists: Salman Rushdie with Shalimar the Clown, Martin Amis with “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” and John Updike with the very imaginatively titled Terrorist:
But John Updike, like Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, is attempting to give you what is in a putative terrorist’s mind as he looks into the eyes of potential victims. I can’t even imagine how difficult that must be artistically, and I can see that it is also difficult politically. Whether a writer chooses to show a terrorist as motivated by a hatred of American foreign policy, or by nothing but religious fervour, or by purely worldly disappointments, or by nihilistic love of death, he or she has entered an ongoing political debate.
If that makes things hard for the writer, it also makes things hard, in a different way, for the reader. On the one hand we are used to this being political territory, but on the other we want something very different from a novel than what we get from the newspapers: we want imaginative understanding, not political positions; we want to get close to a fictional individual rather than stand in judgment over a real group; we want the challenge of speculation rather than the reassurance of certainty. We want art, not news, at a time when news seems to be drowning out art.
Walter says she was disappointed by all three works, because “research has replaced empathy.” I find myself largely in agreement with her, with one exception: I think that out of the three (Amis, Updike, Rushdie) the only one who has pulled it off is Rushdie–and coincidentally, he’s the only one who has actually had any brush with real terrorists.
Ben MacIntyre reviews Pankaj Mishra’s new book, Temptations of the West for the New York Times Book Review:
Mishra reports on a world in which the cultural definitions are constantly evolving, eliding and colliding. His travels are also interwoven with pungent commentary on modern politics in South Asia. Few politicians escape unburned; some are roasted. Indira Gandhi is held up as a triumph of mediocrity: “a not particularly sensitive or intelligent woman . . . exalted by accident of birth and a callow political culture into the chieftancy of a continent-size nation.”
While there is fury in Mishra’s account of his homeland and its neighbors, there is also a fierce love. He is particularly moved by the sight of ordinary Indians trudging off to vote for politicians who often do not deserve it.
It’s a very positive write-up, but I was surprised at the frequency of certain labels: “angry book,” “fury in Mishra’s account,” “book will enrage many Indian readers,” “not a gentle book,” and so on. Compare and contrast with this review by Charles Foran in the Globe and Mail, which uses words like “vivid,” “intrepid,” “daring,” and where the adjective “angry” is nowhere to be seen:
Were Temptations of the West simply a collection of travel essays that ponders how places like India and Nepal negotiate a globalized planet, it would still be a fine book. But the intensity of Mishra’s prose suggests that he wants the disruption, and the upheaval, to be felt viscerally. Daring reportage, and an obvious empathy for ordinary people, goes some way toward this ambition.
As important, though, is the use of his own narrative as evidence of the “bewildering complexity” faced by individuals swept along by those negotiations. If, as he claims, the movement for one traveller at least was from “ignorance and prejudice to a measure of self-awareness and knowledge,” then it might prove the same for certain readers. Great books, and great books only, can have that rare effect.
Intrigued, yet?
The inimitable George Saunders, whose The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil is out in the UK, describes his first visit in England, a place he finds somewhat confusing:
“One finds oneself longing for the simplicity of America, where, for example, everyone understands that New York City is a city, that Cleveland is a state in either Ohio or Indiana, and that the Mississippi River, I’m pretty sure, does not run in any state other than Mississippi. Or city. I can’t remember if Mississippi is a city or a … Anyway, the point is, the American visitor to Britain can avoid all confusion by simply referring to his hosts and hostesses as “you guys.”
More here.