Category: literary life
Novelist Rashim Esenov from Turkmenistan became the first writer to accept PEN’s Freedom To Write Award in person, at a gala event. (Because of the nature of the award, the recipients are usually in prison, or not able to travel to New York.) Apparently, Esenov’s ‘offence’ was:
According to PEN, he was arrested two years ago when he returned to Turkmenistan from a trip to Moscow with 800 copies of his banned trilogy, “Ventsenosny Skitalets” (“The Crowned Wanderer”), about a 16th-century Turkmen poet and general, Bayram Khan, who is said to have saved the Mogul empire from breaking apart.
Mr. Esenov was accused of smuggling the books and with inciting national and religious hatred. Although he was released from prison a few weeks after his arrest, he was forbidden to leave Turkmenistan, even to seek medical treatment in Moscow. Many of his books were burned.
After leaving New York, Esenov is due to go to Moscow for medical treatment, and then he “expects to return to his homeland after that. It is unclear what his status will be then.”
Michael Lowenthal writes in about an interesting Pen event, Writing and Expression in Wartime. Writers Rebecca Faery, James Caroll, Nathaniel Fick, and Uzodinma Iweala discuss questions posed for writers in wartime.
This all takes place tonight, Thursday, April 20th at 7:00 pm at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Monitor has a profile of Doreen Baingana, who was in Kampala for the launch of her collection of short stories in Uganda. If you haven’t read her book, Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe, you should.
In the Times, Zoe Paxton tries to find out if Gautam Malkani’s much-hyped Londonstani is ‘authentic’ by visiting a class of teenagers from Hounslow, West London–where the novel is set:
Two weeks before its publication, the book is already notorious for two things: the money and the language.The centre of a huge bidding war at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, it was bought by Fourth Estate for a six-figure advance (the rumour is £380,000).
Why the fuss? Mainly because Londonstani is written in a head-spinning, expletive-rich mixture of Asian street slang, text-speak, MTV talk and bastardised Punjabi that supposedly reflects the patois of West London Asian gangs. By writing in dialect, Malkani has set himself a tough task; it has worked for Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh, but critics had their doubts about the dictated letters in dialect that appeared in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.
That’s not a very apt comparison. The issue with the chapters written in Hasina’s point of view in Brick Lane is this: Hasina presumably writes her letters in Bengali, her native language, and the novelist renders them for us in English. And yet the language of the letters is a pidginized English, which is a rather odd stylistic choice. But based on the description of Malkani’s book, he’s actually trying to approximate the dialect of English that these kids are using. In any case, Paxton leaves the class with reassurances from the kids that the author had gotten it right even if “you would never, ever write these words down.”
I had expected E.L. Doctorow to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The March, but the prize went to another, similarly titled book: March, by Geraldine Brooks.
Several people sent me this link to Fernanda Eberstadt’s profile of Marrakech-based Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine. Nothing terribly new in the piece, and I suppose I would have enjoyed it were it not for comments like this:
[Goytisolo’s] political essays, denouncing the official neglect that led to last November’s rioting in Paris suburbs, the corruption and tyranny of Arab governments or what he sees as the pernicious influence of Christian evangelism on American foreign policy, appear in Europe’s most prestigious newspapers.
The neglect of minorities in France and the tyranny of Arab governments are stated as incontrovertible facts, but the influence of Christian evangelism gets to be qualified with a “what he sees as.” Ugh.