Category: literary life

My friend Hisham Matar has a very moving piece in Granta about Ghassan Kanafani. Here is a tiny excerpt:

For the twenty-three days that the Israeli bombardment of Gaza persisted, I would wake up at four a.m. and sit with yesterday’s paper, then read the news online, then walk to the local newsagent and get the day’s paper. Suddenly it would be lunchtime. I could not respond when asked what I thought, or ‘Isn’t it terrible?’ I spent too long online looking at photographs and watching videos, reading articles, listening to interviews. On the fourth of January, a week after the bombardment started, a friend sent me a piece he had written on the assault. I read it and wrote a long email that every other day I would edit and revise. In the end I never sent it.

I called my mother and whenever she said something about Gaza I changed the subject. It was during one such conversation that my eye fell on a name on my shelf: Ghassan Kanafani. I had not read him since boyhood. I flicked through the collection of short stories until I came upon one called ‘Letter From Gaza’. I read it, photocopied it and took it with me to a reading I was giving at the University of Cambridge. I did not read it but seemed to need it there in my pocket.

Please read it all here.

I am heading down to UC Irvine today for a panel discussion, though I’m running late because I just spent the last hour perusing the complete drafts of Madame Bovary, which the University of Rouen has put up online. The university’s researchers have been working on this site for quite some time. (See, for instance, this earlier post.) But this is the édition intégrale, which means that every single page of every single draft should be there. I revise obsessively, so Flaubert is a man after my own heart.

(via the indispensable Literary Saloon)

In a story that is bound to hearten writers who deal with rejections (which is to say, pretty much all of them), news came yesterday that George Orwell’s Animal Farm was rejected by T.S. Eliot when Eliot was editorial director at Faber and Faber.

In a letter from 1944 explaining why he would not be publishing the work, Eliot told Orwell that he was not persuaded by the “Trotskyite” politics which underpin the narrative. To publish such an anti-Russian novel would jar in the contemporary political climate, explained the poet.

“We have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time. It is certainly the duty of any publishing firm which pretends to other interests and motives other than mere commercial prosperity to publish books which go against the current of the moment,” wrote Eliot, before going on to say that he was not convinced that “this is the thing that needs saying at the moment.” The letter, which has been in the private collection of Eliot’s widow, Valerie, since he died, is explored in a forthcoming edition of the BBC documentary series, Arena.

I read the published excerpts from Eliot’s letter several times and I still can’t figure exactly what Eliot had against the book. Maybe I just need some coffee. Or maybe rejections are just opaque to me.

I am heading out to Santa Barbara for a literary festival there, but I did want to stop for a moment and note the passing of the great Moroccan intellectual Abdelkebir Khatibi. Maghreb Arabe Presse, the official news agency of Morocco, announced the news earlier this week. It has been many, many years since I read La Mémoire Tatouée (and I can’t seem to locate a copy; has the book gone out of print?). I remember seeing him, in his brown cloak, as he walked down the corridors of the literature building at the university; he inspired such awe in all of us. You can read notices in Al Jazeera, Le Matin, Le Monde, and El País. Pierre Joris has posted a remembrance on his blog.

PEN and 59 other organizations have signed a letter calling on attorney general Eric Holder to stop the practice of denying U.S. visas to foreign writers and intellectuals whose views do not appeal to the State Department. The practice (started during the Cold War) was revived during the Bush administration. One of its victims is the Swiss-Egyptian scholar Tariq Ramadan, whose case will be appealed in court in a few days. It will be interesting to see what happens.

When John Cheever died in 1982, he left behind a 4,300-page journal that was later (and fortunately for the reader) made available to the literary biographer Blake Bailey. His book John Cheever: A Life has just been published and Maud Newton reviews it for the Barnes and Noble Review.

Originally the author’s plans for this massive chronicle of his own evolution were unclear, but as the years passed and bisexuality entered his fiction more freely, Cheever took to showing explicit passages from his journals to visitors (although he never received the excoriation or absolution — whichever it was — that he craved). He also, notes Bailey, “became increasingly convinced that the journal was not only a crucial part of his own oeuvre, but an essential contribution to the genre,” despite or perhaps because of its focus on sex. “I read last year’s journal with the idea of giving it to a library,” he wrote. “I am shocked at the frequency with which I refer to my member.” It is a testament both to Bailey’s gift for storytelling and to the multitudinous variations of Cheever’s capacity for self-deception and self-loathing that this massive biography engages throughout its 700-plus pages.

The piece gives a clear sense of how troubled and isolated Cheever’s life was. I’m going to put this book on my to-read list.