Two Novels: one about the making of a monster, the other about the making of a freak.

 Maud Ventura’s buzzy second novel, Célèbre (Make Me Famous in English translation) starts only when its young French narrator Cleo moves to New York City to try to launch her career as a singer. Celebrity, ambition, success, are synonymous with America. What came before, her unremarkable bourgeois childhood in Paris as the only child of irreproachable parents, is prologue. Important prologue, though, because nothing in the values of her upbringing explains or excuses the manic drive with which she pursues fame and fortune. Only, as she notes in a rare moment of self-awareness, that she had always felt entitled to stardom, to an exceptional destiny. To fulfill it, she endures uncomplainingly the deprivations and sacrifices demanded by a dehumanizing American music industry. Never satisfied with her own performance, she grimly cuts herself in private for her perceived lapses or weaknesses. She would have exchanged sexual favors for advancement without a qualm, but dedication, ruthlessness, and strategic marketing of her talent, prove sufficient to send her rapidly up the ladder of the charts. But the experience of success rapidly balloons into megalomania and ever more manic and ruthless chasing of the next shiny prize, all the way to the unimaginable conclusion.

Another novel, dissimilar in most ways but one, the name checking of pop culture references of the era, is Grégoire Delacourt’s La Femme qui ne Veillissait Pas. It inevitably brings to mind Annie Ernaux’s celebrated The Years, in telling the story of the heroine in the socio-cultural context of each decade of her life, beginning with the mid fifties. From the diabolo menthe she was served as a child in her modest Paris neighborhood bar to the new suburbs with their “pavillions,” detached housing boasting big bathrooms. From the veterans of the Algerian War with their physical and psychic traumas to the student riots of May1968 with their long hair and “elephant leg” (bell bottom) trousers. Fashions in clothes, hairdos, music, pop singers, curated as meticulously as museum pieces, to mark the passage of time, which, miraculously, disturbingly and ultimately tragically, somehow bypasses the heroine completely…

 

New Stories from the South, Resurrected

 New Stories from the South

As the book review columnist for the erstwhile Chapel Hill News, I reviewed a decade’s worth of the original Algonquin series of New Stories from the South. Fifteen years later, the resurrection of the series by Blair, edited by friend and colleague Robin Muira, was therefore doubly welcome. The just launched 2026 edition spans a wide range of voices and geographies. For example, a through line runs between two deceptively dissimilar stories: one narrator is a young girl growing up in Bangladeshi slum, the other a girl of the same age raised in the rarefied atmosphere of American academia. Both girls strive for attention and approval from a selfish, emotionally distant father; both girls are ultimately disillusioned. 

Is On Chesil Beach, the film based on Ian McEwan’s novel, a “period piece?”

 Sounds odd to call a film set in the sixties and seventies a “period piece,” but On Chesil Beach, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, so carefully and intentionally recreates the minutest details of the distinctive clothes, hairstyles, foods, furnishings and music of those years, that it could be called a museum piece. Attitudes too: young people who think nothing of walking seven miles each way, in “plimsols” and ballerina flats, to meet each other. Well brought up girls whose sole preparation for the conjugal night is a euphemistic sex manual. The central conflict of the story is equally inseparable from its era: the upheaval between the early sixties before the “Sex Revolution” and a decade later, the “Free Love” seventies. I enjoyed watching the film last night on Netflix.

How Gloria Steinem Reconciled me to Feminism

 How Gloria Steinem reconciled me to feminism.

My first encounter with feminism was a rude one: reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as a twenty-year-old student in London in the seventies. Her seminal work, published before I was born, was a revelation to me, with its concept of “The Other:” the subordinate, the disempowered by gender, race or class. I suddenly saw familiar French authors through her eyes: Stendhal was a proto feminist, Montherlant a narcissistic, racist misogynist.

But in the mini-skirted, blow-dried seventies, dowdy old De Beauvoir with her turbans was a relic. Equally off putting was the grim, uncomprising feminism of Greer and Friedman, however impressive their intellectual constructs.

Only Gloria Steinem seemed relatable, with her straight, center-parted hair, her soft face, her stylish bell-bottoms and hipster belts. She gave you permission to be feminine and a feminist. None of the bra-burning, ungroomed armpits, man-demonizing radicalism. Steinem gave me permission to hold on to the loving, empowering legacy of my father and other “patriarchal” figures in my life, while acknowledging the injustice and inequality historically imposed on women.

Steinem was the gateway drug to feminism for many.

The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

 The Sisters

By Jonas Hassen Khemiri

The Sisters and The Brothers might be more apt, since this saga follows the parallel and periodically intersecting lives of two sets of three siblings born in Sweden of a Tunisian-Swedish union. In both cases, the Tunisian parent is shifty, unreliable, inexplicably absent, withholding. The Swedish parent is solid but colorless. In this autobiographical novel, the narrator, who shares the author’s first and last names, is the oldest of three brothers whose Tunisian father lets them down, repeatedly, while their hardworking Swedish mother keeps them afloat. The three sisters are the daughters of a Swedish father who died early, and an unstable, cold Tunisian mother who repeatedly abandons them, dipping in and out of schizophrenic episodes. Ina, the oldest sister, like Jonas, the oldest brother, is abnormally tall, and carries the weight of responsibility. The middle sister, Evelyn, is the irresponsible charmer, and the youngest, Anastasia, the damaged drug dependent.

This is not Khemiri’s first work of fiction, but it is his first to be written in English. It shares the length and exhaustive detail of many first autobiographical works. It also subscribes the unhurried sense of time of Scandinavian writers. The chapters weave in and out of unconnected anecdotes not entirely justified by the resulting final tapestry. Some one-sentence passages move with almost Joycean propulsive force, but others indulge in play-by-play, pointless accounts of a basketball game, for example. Still, Khemiri’s voice is distinctive and often compelling, if the reader is prepared to go along for a ride where the detours, not the destination, are the purpose.

Did Nolan “whitewash” Homer? Should he have?

 Did Nolan “whitewash” Homer? Should he have?

The self-styled “champions of Western civilization” who are outraged by Christopher Nolan’s revisionist version of the Odyssey should be defending it instead. Why? The Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, who may have lived circa the 8thC BCE, retell Bronze Age myths that preceded their author by some 500 years. So Homer’s retelling of these myths was not only influenced by the mores of his own time and place, but also by what he imagined the lives of Bronze Age Acheans to have been. In a word, or rather three of Hobbes’s: nasty, brutish, and short. Men were violent, cruel, greedy, deeply ignorant and superstitious. They were also misogynist. In Homer’s retelling, women and demi-goddesses seduced men to betray and enthrall them. The infidelity of Sparta’s queen Helen is the justification for launching “a thousand ships” of war against Troy. Calypso and Circe lure, deceive, blackmail, and enslave Odysseus and his men. Only patient Penelope falls on the right side of the “Madonna or whore” divide.

Is this the edifying image of Western Civilization that we wish to present? Critics of Nolan’s film who accuse him of whitewashing Homer’s stories are quite right, he does so. He presents his protagonists as men of conscience and honor, and attributes to them the moral and intellectual virtues developed over the intervening 32 centuries of progress in history, religion and philosophy. The civilizing centuries that brought us Aristotle and the Abrahamic religions, Rousseau and the Enlightenment, Newton and space exploration. The centuries that separate us, we hope, from the mindless, guzzling man-pigs of Circe’s Bronze Age.

Book Review: the Magdalen Laundries horror brought home in a novel by Claire Keegan

At the urging of a friend, I read this fictionalized account of one man’s shocked awakening to the hidden horrors of the Magdalen Laundries. Of course I had read the journalistic exposés about the cruel exploitation of unwed mothers by a particular order of nuns. But the novel addresses a thornier question: how could an entire town have remained willfully ignorant, or at least unwilling to act? Claire Keegan sets the narrative in 1985, a time of great economic hardship in Ireland. Her protagonist, Bill, is a decent, hardworking man, making an honest but precarious living as a coal merchant, providing for his church-going wife and five daughters, in a tight-knit community where the nuns are figures of power and wealth. The novel is very short, but Keegan takes her time laying out the daily details of Bill’s family and work life, relaying the exchanges in the local patois, to make a point. An ordinary man, not a hero or a rebel, must make a stand. One of the pleasures of this novel is the occasional unexpected image: a woman’s hair is neither red nor brown, but the colour of cinnamon. If I have a nit to pick, it is that the dialogue can sound too expository to be natural. And there is a puzzling episode: Bill happens upon an unknown neighbor in her nightgown, and experiences fleeting desire for her. Is it meant to emphasize that he is no saint? But that aside, how is it that, in this tight-knit community, he has no idea who the woman and her family in the house across the road are?

Somerset Maugham and DH Lawrence, revisited.

According to my principle that if you read a work before you were twenty, that first time doesn’t count, I am now (re)reading two masters of early twentieth century English fiction, Somerset Maugham and D.H. Lawrence. Not exactly beach reading, but what you grab at random from your old schoolgirl bookcase as you head out the door. Both writers were obsessed with class, both borderline misogynistic. One of them, Lawrence, bonafide working class; the other, Maugham, bourgeois, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. In his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, Maugham’s mercilessly mocking parody of Cockney underclass accents, tastes, and mores comes across today as shockingly snobbish and judgmental. Their lives are “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Hobbesian terms. They drink and procreate “in the double digits.” The men beat their wives and even their lovers, and the women have hair-dragging, face-clawing catfights. And yet Maugham is not entirely unsympathetic. His eponymous heroine, Liza, high-spirited and coquettish as she is, starts off with her own code of conduct. Maugham presents her downfall as an inevitable consequence of her circumstances rather than due to an inherent vice.

Lawrence also transcribes the Nottinghamshire dialect of his coal miner milieu with its “thee” and “thou” but without caricature or irony. He is equally aware of the ready brutality of the men, and the hard lives of the women, but he sees their lives as essentially tragic, and worthy of dignity. Lawrence himself escaped the “downpit” life he was born into, but the humiliation and class resentment transpires through all his work.

Two Related, Timely Books addressing Conflict and Conscience

 Two timely, related books: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message and Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. Both are reporters and both make a plea for the humanization of those whose victimhood is conveniently ignored by the media. The world view of both writers springs from a personal history that is inextricable from the objective realities they witness and report.

Coates travels to Dakar, Senegal, to retrace the origins of the slave trade, and experiences a conflicting sense of himself as, simultaneously, belonging as Black but foreign as American. He then travels through Israel and the West Bank and is shocked by the systematic oppression of Palestinians under Israeli rule. When he notices that some houses have cisterns on the roof to catch rainwater and others do not, he learns that Israelis are given permits to have cisterns but Palestinians are almost always denied that permission. He relates these conditions to what his slave ancestors experienced in the South.

Omar El Akkad recounts his family’s journey from their native Egypt to Qatar then Canada and eventually the United States. In due course, after college, he becomes a journalist, a war reporter covering the invasion of Afghanistan and other conflicts for major Canadian and American newspapers. Years later, he is jolted out of his comfortable middle-class life in Oregon with his wife and child, by the Gaza war and its brutality. He is particularly shocked out of his complacency by the dehumanizing way in which the relentless bombing of Gaza is covere in the Western media. He had believed that American society would not violate its own rights, freedoms and principles beyond a certain point. But El Akkad does not absolve himself of the human struggle to fully empathize with the suffering of others: he notes that a momentary fright over the health of his five-year-old daughter terrifies him beyond anything he sees on the news.

Is This Really Iran’s “Arab Spring”?

 Is This Really Iran’s “Arab Spring”?

I remember the precise moment in February 2011 when I decided to go to Tahrir. I had been in Egypt on vacation that winter, as I often am, when the revolt against the thirty-year dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak erupted on January 25th. My initial caution was shared by many: dread of chaos and pessimism about a democratic outcome. The tipping point for me came when Mubarak’s police forces started shooting at peaceful civilian demonstrators. For the first time, I joined the throngs finding their way to Tahirir in support of the young protesters camping there.

I wonder, now, how Iranians are feeling. Is the tipping point for many of them the massacre of student protesters in January? By all reports the majority of the population is young, well-educated, and chafing under a cruelly repressive regime. Are they now welcoming the chance to topple the regime, even at the cost of foreign intervention? For others, is the bombing of their cities and collateral deaths of their fellow Iranians at the hands of Israeli and American forces too high a price? Do they look at Iraq after the American invasion of 2003 and want none of it?

In Egypt in January 2011, there was no bombing by foreign forces. There may have been covert intervention, as some have claimed, but whatever the case, the young idealists in Tahrir acted in good faith. If there had been an aerial attack by Israel in support of toppling Mubarak, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have spelled the end of any support for a revolutionary movement. Case in point: when Egypt was attacked in 1956, and again in 1967, even those who hated Nasser, those he persecuted most, like my father’s family, did not hesitate for a moment as to where their loyalties lay.

Liberal-minded Iranians today are in a hard place, whether they were hoping for foreign intervention to free them from the yoke of draconian mullah rule, or distrusting it. The odds of a democratic outcome are problematic, to say the least, and the lessons of the Arab Spring are cautionary in this respect. Egypt today, after months of turmoil and a brief, unserious flirtation with an Islamist party, has defaulted back to military dictatorship. 

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