Category: literary life

Well, here’s a man who can’t argue he was “misled.” Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative theorist, has written a new book in which he criticizes the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. In America at the Crossroads, the professor outlines the evolution of his thinking about America’s foreign policy; specifically:

Mr. Fukuyama also contends that many neoconservatives — particularly those belonging to the “expansive, interventionist, democracy-promoting” school, defined by Mr. Kristol and Mr. Kagan — misinterpreted the collapse of Communism and the end of the cold war. By putting too much emphasis on the American military buildup under Ronald Reagan “as the cause of the USSR’s collapse, when political and economic factors were at least as important,” he contends, forward-leaning neocons came to the conclusion that “history could be accelerated through American agency.”

In other words, neoconservatives leaped from the premise that democracy is likely to expand universally in the long run (a view Mr. Fukuyama has promoted himself) to the notion that this historical process could be hastened by United States efforts to implement regime changes in places like Iraq. At the same time, Mr. Fukuyama says, these theorists seem to have assumed that the rapid and relatively peaceful transition to democracy and free markets made by countries like Poland could be replicated in other parts of the world — never mind the state of local institutions, traditions and infrastructure.

You can read the rest of Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review here.

Forget the curse of the second novel. Time conjures up a “curse of the third novel” for Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides The Hurt, giving it a pretty negative review.

There is a truth at the heart of this novel, although that doesn’t make it good. The truth is that names can reveal the hidden essence of a thing, but they can also conceal it. That is an insight the reader will arrive at long before Whitehead’s protagonist does (you may possibly be aware of it before opening the book). In the meantime he mopes around town riffing on the ephemera of small-town America and indulging his obsession with brand names. The tone is light, by turns over- and underwritten. Our hero seems as uninterested in his fate as we are.

Ouch. And while Publishers’ Weekly seems to agree with this take, Booklist gives the book a starred review.

Annie Proulx is pissed off that Brokeback Mountain, the film adaptation of her short story, did not win Best Picture at the Academy Awards two weeks ago.

We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash – excuse me – Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.

And she’s unrepentant about the rant: “For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.” Don’t you just love it when writers throw fits?

Paul Zakrzewski reviews three short story collections for the Washington Post: Davy Rothbart’s The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, Craig Davidson’s Rust and Bone, and my pal Tod Goldberg’s Simplify. Of Simplify, Zakrzewski says:

Goldberg’s best stories are told in retrospect, as if the narrators need psychic distance to fashion their memories in the most potent form. My favorite is “The Living End,” a haunting account of the summer of 1973, when the narrator’s older brother returns from Vietnam with strange scrapes and bruises; the story becomes a mystery that involves the abduction of a Native American girl across the street. This story has a stable nuclear family at its center — not stable enough, however, to stave off the enormous forces that conspire to destroy its children.

Read it all here.

The Guardian has published Athol Fugard’s notes as he was conceiving of Tsotsi, the novel whose film adaptation just won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

Joburg to Orlando train. Tsotsis. Bicycle spoke – death.

The idea for a story – criminal: completely shrouded in darkness. At a moment – a stab of light and pain. This followed, developed, in the span of a short time leads to the full Christian experience after a meeting with a priest in an empty church.

The end – a life saved. (A useless life saved? Old man?) Held and refusing to let go. Carried, cherished – dying with it? Love.

His dark shroud expressed in nihilism, anarchy. Hate.

“Nothing is precious. Nothing is worth keeping. Destruction.” And then to find something precious. Shoebox baby.

I felt at once uncomfortable and excited at reading the notes, like a voyeur spying someone undressing through a window. Scattered around my office, I have notes for my own book, and the thought of someone else looking at them, instead of at the work itself, is almost unbearable to me. Maybe this will change in a few years…

Nominees for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize have been announced. In fiction, the shortlist includes E.L. Doctorow for The March, Mary Gaitskill for Veronica, Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Nick Hornby for A Long Way Down, and Haruki Murakami for Kafka on the Shore.

In the first fiction category, the nominees include Kirstin Allio for Garner, Karen Fisher for A Sudden Country, Olga Grushin for The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Uzodinma Iweala for Beasts of No Nation, and Marlon James for John Crow’s Devil.

I’m pretty psyched that Garner was included–the book, you’ll remember, was the LBC’s winter Read This! selection.