Category: literary life

A couple of weeks ago, the Observer dubbed Faïza Guène the ‘voice of the suburbs;’ this week, the Guardian calls Tahar Ben Jelloun the ‘voice of the Maghreb.’ What’s with the fixation with voice? And in the singular? It’s funny, I’ve never seen profiles of, say, Juan Goytisolo in Moroccan newspapers calling him ‘the voice of Spain.’

In any case, the article on Ben Jelloun makes for a worthwhile read, recapping all the major milestones in the author’s life. An interesting tidbit:

“I didn’t like Bowles, the man or the writer. He loved young Moroccan boys and preferred them illiterate. He’d write books in their words; it was an ambiguous relationship.” He preferred the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. “I asked him, ‘why Tangier in the ’50s?’ He answered, ‘boys and hashish – and neither is expensive’. But at least he was frank.” Later, in Paris, Ben Jelloun became friends with Jean Genet, who taught him “about everything – writing, politics”, and whom he depicted in a short story, “Genet and Mohamed, or the Prophet Who Woke Up the Angel”.

Among his inspirations are Cervantes, who was influenced by Andalucian Arab culture; Matisse; and Fernando Pessoa (“I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer”).

You can read the article in full here.

The latest issue of the New York Review of Books includes a reprint of the speech that Orhan Pamuk gave a few days ago at the opening of the World Voices Festival in New York. In it, he describes how, as a young man, he was asked to serve as a guide to Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller as they visited Istanbul to offer support to writers who had been imprisoned in the wake of the military coup of 1980. He had been chosen for the job because he was fluent in English, and he went with the two playwrights from house to house to visit with writers:

Until then I had stood on the margins of the political world, never entering unless coerced, but now, as I listened to suffocating tales of repression, cruelty, and outright evil, I felt drawn to this world through guilt–drawn to it, too, by feelings of solidarity, but at the same time I felt an equal and opposite desire to protect myself from all this, and to do nothing in life but write beautiful novels. As we took Miller and Pinter by taxi from appointment to appointment through the Istanbul traffic, I remember how we discussed the street vendors, the horse carts, the cinema posters, and the scarfless and scarf-wearing women that are always so interesting to Western observers. But I clearly remember one image: at one end of a very long corridor in the Istanbul Hilton, my friend and I are whispering to each other with some agitation, while at the other end, Miller and Pinter are whispering in the shadows with the same dark intensity. This image remained engraved in my troubled mind, I think, because it illustrated the great distance between our complicated histories and theirs, while suggesting at the same time that a consoling solidarity among writers was possible.

Later, reflecting on how things have turned out, some twenty years later, Pamuk concludes:

The theme of this year’s PEN festival is reason and belief. I have related all these stories to illustrate a single truth –that the joy of freely saying whatever we want to say is inextricably linked with human dignity. So let us now ask ourselves how “reasonable” it is to denigrate cultures and religions, or, more to the point, to mercilessly bomb countries, in the name of democracy and freedom of thought. My part of the world is not more democratic after all these killings. In the war against Iraq, the tyrannization and heartless murder of almost a hundred thousand people has brought neither peace nor democracy. To the contrary, it has served to ignite nationalist, anti-Western anger. Things have become a great deal more difficult for the small minority who are struggling for democracy and secularism in the Middle East. This savage, cruel war is the shame of America and the West. Organizations like PEN and writers like Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller are its pride.

A highly recommended (and freely available) read.

Norwegian author Per Petterson has won the 2006 Foreign Fiction Prize handed out by the Independent, Boyd Tonkins reports.

In the New York Times, Reza Aslan writes about the significance of the Shahnameh to Iranian culture. A new translation by Dick Davis of the epic story was released in the United States last month. I’m really looking forward to finally reading it.

Remember Zoo Press? The small press that took writers’ money for a contest but never picked a winner? In the current issue Poets and Writers, Tom Hopkins charts how Neil Azevedo went from promising independent publisher everyone wanted to partner with to a pariah who was dodging emails and phone calls.

In a recent telephone conversation, Azevedo admitted that, historically, more than half of Zoo Press’s annual budget was derived from entry fees; the remainder came from book sales. Azevedo insists, however, that the press never “generate[d] the kind of income that you get rich on—or even get by on. I really want to bust the myth that somehow I’m sitting here in Omaha on a gold throne that’s been paid for by the contest entries,” he says. “It’s so not like that.” Zoo Press paid him an “insignificant” salary, Azevedo says. “I probably made like two dollars an hour.” By 2005, he was putting his own money into the press—going, he says, “into the toilet” financially. “For everybody who felt like they lost something, I certainly lost more,” says Azevedo, who claims he lost “tens of thousands of dollars—personally,” in both credit card debt and personal savings. As for the lack of communication cited by Baker and several Zoo Press authors, Azevedo says it was a “routine silence” that “just extended and extended.”

While Azevedo won’t confirm that the press will indeed close, “Zoo,” he says, “is likely closing up shop.” Azevedo has been holding out hope for the press’s survival. A colleague of his in Omaha, he says, had considered the possibility of starting a nonprofit company that would then buy Zoo Press outright, retaining Azevedo solely in an advisory capacity; in late February, however, that prospect fell through completely. Now Azevedo is trying to find another publisher to acquire Zoo Press’s backlist (the contracts and the physical books in UNP’s warehouse), as well as the books in contractual limbo. He hopes that the twenty-nine titles that the press has published, including a book of poetry by the lead singer of Wilco, Jeff Tweedy, will be an appealing proposition for someone. “What’s saddest to me,” Azevedo says, “is that in the event that I [became] incapacitated—which, I guess, I kinda did—nobody really cared.”

You can read Hopkins’ article in its entirety over at P&W.

Over at Beatrice, Cristina Henriquez contributes an appreciation of Junot Díaz’s classic short story “The Sun, The Moon, The Stars.” If you have not yet read this marvel, I envy you the feeling of joy and discovery when you do. The story appeared in the New Yorker in 1998, and was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 1999, edited by Amy Tan. Buy it. Read it.