Apparently the recent London Book Fair featured Arabic literature. That would have been really interesting to go to.

As compensation, I found an interesting article in the Guardian. They asked a good number of authors and academics about what it’s like to be an Arab or Egyptian author today and what books they would recommend or like to see translated into English.

Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian article:

Adania Shibli
Palestinian writer

I remember a story from four years ago in Ramallah. One night the Israeli army stormed a building in which somebody I knew lived. Everyone was told to get out. After a few hours, the army announced it wanted to blow up the building and gave the inhabitants 20 minutes to go up to their rooms and retrieve what they could. When my friend went up he didn’t know what to take; he had all of his life there, he was totally lost. He finally went to the washing machine, emptied it and went out with the washing, leaving everything else behind to be blown up a few minutes later.

In the same way, I could never say which text to have translated from Arabic into English; if I did, it might be the least important.

I keep thinking about him standing there with his arms full of laundry watching his home being destroyed.

Sadly, I found pretty much none of the mentioned authors available in English, but I did find a few in French. I’m going to try the bookshop at the Institut du Monde Arabe, they should have a good selection.

It’s wonderful to finally be able to read in another language — even if I still need my dictionary. The ones I learned in school and forgot don’t count because I was foolish enough to lose them. So now I’m discovering all kinds of new writers: French, Italian, Spanish, African, and on and on.

You won’t hear me say this too often: “Don’t read the book, see the movie.”

The movie wasn’t perfect, but was obviously making an effort to examine the characters and ended with an interesting ethical question. When I saw that it was based on a book, I couldn’t resist. I should have. Especially since it cost me 11 euros 40. Which is, for me, a fair bit of time in the salt mines.

It’s my own fault. A dreadful prejudice of mine: that no matter how good the film was, the book must be better.

I’ll admit right up front that I’m not a fan of mystery/thriller novels. That’s being polite. But in the spirit of “what the hell, you never know” I gave it a go. Unfortunately, I was deeply unimpressed. (Re-enforcing that prejudice.)

So why was I so deeply unimpressed?

The first thing that struck me were certain descriptions. They were so bad I kept thinking: “I must not be getting the joke”. The author wasn’t joking. He wasn’t going for a surrealist effect or parodying anything. Brace yourself, here’s a few examples picked semi-randomly:

[four men at a bar] “One of them, a busted heap of red veins and yellowing skin named Lenny, said,…”

How a human being could possibly manage to look like a “busted heap” of anything is utterly beyond my imagination. And I think I have a pretty good one. Now throw in the veins and the skin and what you have here is the aftermath of a really nasty industrial accident.

Here’s another one:

“…with a wide body that seemed as if the thick flesh had wrapped itself in layers over the bone as opposed to expanding organically as the body grew.”

Now the writer is obviously at pains to make a point here, but what that point might be… Frankly, I can’t picture a person whose flesh is “layered”. (Almost sounds like a cellulite treatment from the film Brazil.)

And it continues:

“Big Dave had a bushel of beard and mustache around his lips…”

A “bushel”? Why the word bushel? The whole thing just sounds weird. A line missing at this point in the narrative might be: “He’d just kissed a puddle of super glue and then applied his face to an unswept barbershop floor.” Why not? At least it would be a little clearer.

What is this about? Is it sheer, unbridled laziness? Lack of talent? Early prototype of a novel writing program? Am I missing something?

Anyhow, it just went on and on with descriptions like this. Plus a lot of clichéd dialogue, chummy/hard-assed characters and unbelievable scenes.

Life is short, see the movie.

Well, I sat down to write something about books, but then I noticed a line break problem on my last post and spent 20 minutes trying to fix it. Notice the word “trying”. I refuse to sacrifice any more of my life to the evil computer gods.

So now I have no idea what I sat down to write about. Instead, I will give you this weather station webcam shot of the delightful puffy clouds we are experiencing today in Paris.

From which one cannot escape by struggling; not to be escaped from.

“All glories of all storms of the air that fell, Prone, ineluctable.” - 1880 Swinburne, Thalassius 222 [OED]

Some words are just unbearably wonderful.

Ineluctable. Say it out loud. If you don’t know how, listen to it here (with an American accent).

I remember one whole week I was in love with the word “scissors”.

At the moment, I’m reading an article in the Times Literary Supplement about Beckett and Mallarmé and their investigations of words in another language. It’s quite interesting and I love Mallarmé’s surreal English lessons and books. (Such a fine line between inspiration and too far out in left field!) I can appreciate what they’re doing, but part of me also thinks it can get a little too self-indulgent at times. Here’s a quotation of a quotation that appears in the TLS article:

In 1930, in one of her most free-associating essays, “On Being ill”, Virginia Woolf meditated on the relation between sounding and meaning:

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other – a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause – which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain . . . . In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty . . . words give out their scent and distil their flavour . . . . Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage.