Category: literary life
The Lit Saloon has an interesting link this morning to Al-Bayane, where some depressing statistics are given on Moroccan publishing: Fewer than 3,000 books have been published between 2002 and 2004 in Morocco; most of these books have a small print run of under 2,000 copies; and the author is often called on to bear the cost (hence the expression “a compte d’auteur,” which is sort of midway between self-publishing and vanity publishing.) Read the numbers, and weep.
As distressing as these numbers are, they don’t, of course, offer a complete picture of readership in Morocco, because the vast majority of the books that you’re likely to see in a bookstore at any given time are not printed locally, but, rather, imported, usually from France. Paperbacks from Folio and Poche, in particular, are fairly inexpensive and still affordable for Moroccan readers. (So, next time someone tells you that the Arab world needs to learn “our” values through “our” culture, just tell them Morocco is awash in “our” culture, and really needs more of its own.)
The most distressing of all the statistics in Al Bayane is that only .53% of books published in Morocco appear in the Amazigh language, which is spoken by fully 30% of population. Granted, that 30% is probably fully bilingual (with Arabic) or even trilingual (with French), but there is really no excuse for why such a large part of Moroccan heritage is not sustained through book culture. According to Le Matin, one of the booths at the Salon was devoted to the Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture, but, even there, many of the offerings about Amazigh culture were available in other languages.
I’ve never read Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and last year’s mention of the epic in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow made me want to read it even more. Well, Shahnameh is now out in a new translation, billed as the most complete yet. Here’s a review.
Portland-based author Justin Tussing’s debut novel, The Best People in the World, has just been published, and it’s reviewed in the NY Times by Dan Chiasson.
One of the pleasures of reading the novel is experiencing its sheer variety of actual things. At times you expect him, like Thoreau, to up and list the cost and quantity of materials it took for his characters to live their outlaw life. Gutters and downspouts of an old farmhouse become clogged by a family of mice, making the rain cascade off its roof. Old, wide oak floorboards will be pillaged in the 80’s for “dining tables and lustrous bars for ostentatious restaurants.”
Tussing will be reading from his novel on Thursday, at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne.
The NY Times has a piece by Dinitia Smith on Arab American playwrights, which cites the work of many artists in the field, including Betty Shamieh, Nathalie Handal, Yussef El-Guindi, and others. The only thing I don’t understand is why one of the interviewees had to go and say something like this:
Mr. Khoury of Silk Road said that conservatism within Muslim culture may be one reason for the scarcity of Arab-American playwrights. Representations of the human form are frowned on, he said: women dancing, or performing in front of men is considered reprehensible.
That’s funny, because “Muslim culture” (whatever the hell that means) has also managed to produce playwrights like Tayeb Saddiki, Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Assia Djebbar, Slimane Benaissa, Ahmed Ghazali, Kateb Yacine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, among many others, so that can hardly be the reason why there aren’t that many Arab playwrights here in America. And as for the representation of the human form, you’d have to strike down the entire Egyptian film industry and the bazillion movies it puts out every year for Khoury’s contention to make any sense, so that’s not the reason either. Couldn’t the reason be, oh I don’t know, a little less complicated? Maybe that first- or second-generation Arab-Americans, like many other minorities here, value the professions (doctor, lawyer, etc.) over art?
Allan Massie reviews Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend, over at the Scotsman:
Nostalgia permeates the novel, for it is not only the story of a friendship that is brought to breaking-point but a melancholy meditation on loss, on the bitter taste of experience, on the closing of the avenues of possibility that seemed to exist – did perhaps exist – in youth.
Tahar Ben Jelloun is a remarkable novelist, and this novel which is at the same time fresh as a spring morning, and sad as an autumn twilight, offers us a wonderful evocation of daily life, of the conflicting claims of friendship and marriage, of the deadening weight of experience that presses on Ali and Mamed in maturity. The writing is simple and direct. Every sentence is telling. It makes you think and feel at the same time. Read it. There is nothing tricksy about it, nothing pretentious. It is that most satisfying of things: a true fiction.
I’ve actually just finished writing my own review of this engrossing and significant novel. More on this soon. In the meantime, those of you who read French can already check out Ben Jelloun’s latest novel, Partir, which is quickly climbing the bestseller lists in France.
The Guardian‘s Stephanie Merritt reveals that novelist AL Kennedy has taken up stand-up comedy.
The novelist’s chief advantage is that she rarely has to face her audience; aside from reviews and the odd book-fair appearance, there is no way of knowing whether a funny line bombed or made the reader laugh out loud, but in the absence of empirical evidence, she can sit at home fondly imagining the latter. So why would a novelist exchange that safe distance for the immediacy of a late-night comedy club, particularly a novelist as seemingly sensitive to criticism as Kennedy, whose website dissects reviews of all her books with occasionally chippy retorts to the reviewer?
The act is made of darkly comic stories rather than jokes. When is she bringing it to the U.S.? That’s what I’d like to know.