Category: literary life

I’m very interested to read Monica Ali’s new novel, Alentejo Blue, which comes out in the United States next month. The Guardian already has a review, and the chief complaint seems to be that this book is not Brick Lane–not the same voice, not the same ‘colorful’ characters, not the same structure, etc.

All the characters bow off too hurriedly, little sketches that never get fleshed out, people glimpsed from a train that is moving too quickly through a strange landscape. Even if you enjoy the ride, you can’t help wishing that Monica Ali had chosen to write about somewhere she knew better, or wanted to know better.

As I was reading the piece, I kept waiting for the appearance of the word “inauthentic”–the word that seems to be the sole criterion by which Ali’s work is judged.

Julia Alvarez, whose new novel Saving the World came out last month, is interviewed by Robert Birnbaum for Identity Theory.

The Guardian has an excerpt from Gary Younge’s forthcoming book, Stranger in a Strange Land that’s very much worth a read. The book chronicles his arrival in America a couple of years after 9/11, and the work he did covering American political life. Right-wing conservatives, he writes, “badgered me as though their own reference points represented the sole prism through which global events could possibly be understood. As if the struggle for moral superiority between Europe and the US could have any relevance to someone whose ancestors were brought to the Americas as slaves and whose parents and grandparents lived through the war under European colonisation. ‘If it wasn’t for us, you would be speaking German,’ they would say. ‘No, if it wasn’t for you,’ I would tell them, ‘I would probably be speaking Yoruba.'”

Over at the Chronicle, Lennard Davis asks: Should one keep on teaching Heart of Darkness, despite its obvious racism? Davis first read the book in high school, where it was interpreted as “a kind of existential journey.” In Edward Said’s class at Columbia, Davis came to see the book as “a stinging indictment of the callous and genocidal treatment of the Africans.” Under a feminist teacher, Davis’s eyes were opened to the “male world that kept women in the dark” about inhuman practices in the colonies. Later, with Chinua Achebe’s famous denouncement, he saw the novella as “hopelessly Eurocentric.” But his black students’ reluctance to read the work leads Davis to wonder:

But my latest learning experience has taught me that this text, which has been mined for so much meaning and inspiration, perhaps needs to be discarded. I can’t underline that point, because the lesson isn’t on the page but in the brain and heart.

As a culture, we have granted certain books immortality and permit them to teach us new lessons across the ages. We’ve given that privilege to the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley (Mary), Defoe, Swift, Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, and more recently Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Silko, and others. But we can rescind that immortality and consign certain books to the back shelves of our consciousness.

This argument keeps cropping up every once in a while: that Heart of Darkness is obsolete because its views on race are retrograde. In my opinion, reading the text with a historical eye is a very useful exercise in how imperialism needs ethnocentrism in order to succeed. Conrad rejected the former, but not the latter–a stance that one can see today as well. I think that the book is as relevant today as it was in 1899. Our culture has a different focus now (the Middle East instead of the Congo) and uses different language (“sand-nigger” instead of “nigger”), but the mission civilisatrice is still there, and there are plenty of Marlowes and Kurtzes around. This is a book, I, for one, would continue to teach.

Thanks to Maud Newton for the link.

My friend Roy Kesey is publishing his first book, a novella called Nothing in the World, which has been praised by George Saunders, Anthony Doerr, Tom Bissell, David Vann, and, uh, me. I loved it. Nothing in the World tells the story of Josko Banovic, a young, lonely Croatian man who soon finds himself dragged into a war he doesn’t quite comprehend, but in which he contributes his share of courage and cowardliness, occasional kindness and utmost cruelty. In a review for TEV, Ron Currie, Jr. writes:

Through Josko, Kesey illustrates the grotesque incongruities of war, how it produces impossible duality, souls in which seemingly contradictory elements can coexist. Josko, like the boy he is, yearns painfully for his sister in one scene; a few pages later, he shoots a man twice in the back and cuts the head off his corpse. He politely insists on paying for rolls from a bakery, then murders a man by slamming his face into the fan of a jeep engine. Like a heartbroken child he follows the voice of the girl he’s imagined is his love, then wanders into a cafe and, as a joke, puts on display the severed head of the man he killed earlier and orders a drink for it. Horrible acts, perpetrated with a coolness that borders on sociopathic, but Kesey merely reports them in his clear, subtly lyrical style, refusing to pass judgment of any kind.

You can find more coverage of Nothing in the World here. So here’s how it works: The first person to send me an email with the subject line “Kesey” gets the free copy. Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Matthew T. from Buxton, Maine.

NPR’s Rene Montagne interviews Wole Soyinka about his new memoir, You Must Set Forth At Dawn. Among other things, Soyinka talks about Ogun (I hope I spelled that right!), a Yoruba deity that has had a huge impact on his work.