Category: literary life

Zaman Online reports that Turkish novelist Elif Shafak (The Saint of Incipient Insanities) has, like Orhan Pamuk earlier this year, been accused of “insulting Turkishness”:

Ultra-rightwing Turkish Lawyers Association Chairman Kemal Kerincsiz, who is infamous for filing complaints against journalists and authors in the country, has filed a complaint against author Elif Safak for her book “Baba and Pic” (Father and Offspring).

Kemal Kerincsiz, who has sued famous Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and ethnic-Armenian writer Hrant Dink, has now also accused Elif Safak of ‘insulting Turkishness’ – over remarks made by Armenian characters in her latest book.

And this kind of ridiculous harassment is likely to continue as long as there is Article 301.

I’m always behind on everything I want to do, so I have only an anthropological interest in the species known as “slacker,” which is the subject of Tom Lutz’s new book, Doing Nothing. Apparently these slackers are here to stay. “They arise in force, [Lutz] suggests, whenever there are major social changes taking place. They are also clowns and jesters, who reveal the illusions we cherish about the work we do. They are the counterforce against which workers must contend, sometimes even within themselves.”

I hate gimmicky travel books, but I have to say I’m intrigued by Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between. It’s the story of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002, with nothing more than a walking stick and a backpack. Call it bravado. Or foolishness. In his NYT review, Tom Bissell had this to say about it:

If, finally, you’re determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. “The Places in Between” is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.

One more to add to the list.

John Gray’s review of Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West : How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond makes me very curious to read it. The book is about the fluidity of cultural frontiers, and how cultures change in response to (peaceful or violent) contact with one another, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Here’s a snippet:

In a brilliant chapter Mishra observes that one of the central aims of India’s 19th-century anti-colonial movements was to invent Hinduism as a religion. As part of building a modern Indian nation that could resist and overthrow British rule, the Hindu elite simplified and remoulded India’s unfathomably rich inheritance of beliefs and practices into something resembling a western creed. Like Shinto in Japan, Hinduism as it figures in Indian politics today is a byproduct of an encounter with the west. In order to resist western domination, Asian peoples have found themselves compelled to copy them. As Mishra observes, India’s anti-colonial elites “denounced British imperialism as exploitative, but even they welcomed its redeeming modernity, and, above all, the European idea of the nation – a cohesive community with a common history, culture, values and sense of purpose – which for many other colonised peoples appeared a way of duplicating the success of the powerful, all-conquering west.” The result has been to exacerbate sectarian divisions, and create them where they did not exist before.

And in an op-ed piece in the same paper, Mishra argues that China and India made important gains when they adapted parts of the free market economy and rejected others.

Economic reforms in the 80s focused on boosting export-oriented industries on the coast. They made China a huge sweatshop for the west’s cheap goods and gave it an average annual growth of 10%. It may be tempting to credit the invisible hand of the free market for this, but, as in the so-called “Asian tiger” economies, the Chinese state has carefully regulated domestic industry and foreign trade and investment, besides maintaining control of public services.

More here.

Sandy Tolan’s new book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, uses a house in Ramla to tell a very poignant story from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Twenty years after his family was forced to flee their house in Ramla, a Palestinian man named Bashir al-Khairi returned to visit it. Thus began an enduring friendship with the woman who now lives in his boyhood home, an Israeli woman named Dalia Eshkenazi. The two tales, one Jewish, one Palestinian, are entertwined in Tolan’s book, and you can listen to interviews with al-Khairi, Eshkenazi, and Sandy Tolan himself, on NPR. An amazing story.

As has been widely reported, this year’s Orange Prize was awarded to Zadie Smith for her novel On Beauty. The chair of the judges praised the book for its “extraordinary characterisation” and “seemingly effortless plotting.”