Fangs for the memory

Amardeep Singh reviews Snakes on a Plane:

The eponymous “snakes” here are clearly the wild slithering irruption of the Real, while the “plane” is the Phallus that operates in the angular, metallic register of the Symbolic. The film thematizes the rebellion of the Real (the resisting third world subaltern, who also represents the death-drive) over the tyrannical, inscribed authority of the Industrial-Aviational Master. Note that the deadliest of the snakes on this particular cinematic plane is the “Monocled Cobra," mainly found in India, which despite its Cyclopean insignia strongly suggests the film be read as a subaltern allegory of “Multitudes,” arrayed in a heterogeneous composite Coalition of the Venomous against the complacent bourgeois “passengers” (nearly all of whom are fated to die), who have sanctioned the postmodernist military adventurism of President George W. Bush.

Musharraf's In The Line of Fire

Pakistan's Big Chief will be releasing his autobiography soon. He's had assistance from someone his editors are careful not to call a ghost writer--"this would not amount to co-authorship". (What would a fake ghost writer be? I don't know, but it wouldn't be the djinnuine article.)
I might skip reading the book; for all its political importance, I bet Musharraf can't match the stylistic exuberance of The Diary of a Social Butterfly (lead item on page).

You say Gare-tuh, I say Goo-tuh

The Millions has a wonderful post up about the proper pronunciations of author's names--it's "Shay-mus" Heaney, not "Shaw-mus", Rill-kuh, not Rill-kee, etc. And at last, I can now say "Ngugi wa'Thiong'o" in public without embarrassing myself.
How about authors from the subcontinent--any names we're not sure how to pronounce?

Looooong lists: Booker, Guardian

The Booker longlist:

Peter Carey for Theft: A Love Story (Faber & Faber)

Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton).

Robert Edric for Gathering the Water (Doubleday).

Nadine Gordimer for Get a Life (Bloomsbury).

Kate Grenville for The Secret River (Canongate).

M. J. Hyland for Carry Me Down (Canongate).

Howard Jacobson for Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape).

James Lasdun for Seven Lies (Jonathan Cape).

Mary Lawson for The Other Side of the Bridge (Chatto & Windus).

Jon McGregor for So Many Ways to Begin (Bloomsbury).

Hisham Matar for In the Country of Men (Viking).

Claire Messud for The Emperor’s Children (Picador).

David Mitchell for Black Swan Green (Sceptre).

Naeem Murr for The Perfect Man (William Heinemann).

Andrew O’Hagan for Be Near Me (Faber & Faber).

James Robertson for The Testament of Gideon Mack (Hamish Hamilton).

Edward St Aubyn for Mother’s Milk (Picador).

Barry Unsworth for The Ruby in her Navel (Hamish Hamilton).

Sarah Waters for The Night Watch (Virago).


The Guardian First Book Prize, 2006:

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living
Carrie Tiffany, above (Picador), fiction

Harbor
Lorraine Adams (Portobello), fiction

John Donne: The Reformed Soul
John Stubbs (Viking), biography

Lonesome George: The Lives and Loves of a Conservation Icon
Henry Nicholls (Palgrave Macmillan), natural history

A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveller
Jason Roberts (Simon & Schuster), biography

Running for the Hills
Horatio Clare (John Murray), memoir

Poppy Shakespeare
Clare Allan (Bloomsbury), fiction

Waiting for the Night-Rowers
Roger Moulson (Enitharmon), poetry

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Yiyun Li (4th Estate), stories

In the Country of Men
Hisham Matar (Viking), fiction

Gunter, Grassed

Reading the reactions--outrage, shock, compassion, righteous wrath, sadness, understanding, anger--to Gunter Grass's confession that he served in the SS in the last phase of the Second World War, I couldn't help wondering: what if he'd just shut up?

He kept his secret for decades; it might well have emerged after his death, but Grass wouldn't have been in a position to care. He might have been spared the rituals of the public confessional: the pillorying, the mandatory mea culpa, the spirited defence by friends, the speculation that he was trapped by the Nobel Prize, the psychological analysis. Why was he silent for so long? I don't know, but I'm wondering: when would have it been the right time to speak? Just after the war, before winning the Nobel, just after winning the Prize, when an SS man stood up at one of his readings and committed suicide in full public view--when would the perfect moment have arisen, the moment when we could see Grass's Nazi record as a 17-year-old boy with clarity, and understand his silence in the years that followed? Why did he speak now? Perhaps, as the more cynical suggest, it was for the publicity--he's just released his autobiography, Peeling The Onion. Or perhaps the explanation is simpler: perhaps he was just old, and tired, and willing, at last, to face his own demons.

How deeply does this affect Grass's moral authority as a writer? Read Adam Hanft, who seems to have the clearest view of the affair of any of the commentators I've read this far.

I'm not convinced it's healthy, in the long-term, for a society to pin the label of moral Zeus on anyone... Truly healthy societies don't draw their moral authority from a single individual, or even a few of them. Evolved societies and cultures are able to situate and draw their moral conclusions from within....
Why should we expect Grass to be any less flawed than other artists who've let us down? Just because he brazenly trumpeted his own virtue makes him no less suspect than Elliott or Pound or Knut Hamsun, a true Nobel Prize-winning Nazi novelist. Grass served a valuable, therapeutic role in the late 50s and early 60s. He reminded us of the power of art to reveal, release and transform. Continuing to look to him as a moral compass - even when he began his Euro freak-out, opposing reunification and retreating into knee-jerk anti-Americanism - was Germany's problem.

Two minor observations. The first is that, as for many Germans of his generation, Grass's service in the Waffen SS was a curious accident of time. Had he been a few years younger, he would not have been eligible for the draft. Had he been a few years older, and if he'd been drafted in, say, 1942 instead of 1944, he would have spent his service killing people and executing Hitler's more vicious orders instead of training to be an anti-tank gunner. It was a strange moment in Germany's military history; he was part of the Waffen without ever being part of its notorious, unforgettable crimes.

The second is that the Grass affair began by sparking a debate that was perhaps healthy; some commentators looked at Germany's attempts to come to terms with the past, some looked at how sharply we might separate an author's life from his work, and at what point that separation might become morally indefensible. But it has now degenerated into the classic modern "say you're sorry" farce. This goes something like so:

"I did terrible things, but now I'm sorry."
"That's not enough. Say you're sorry."
"I just did, but okay, I'm really really sorry."
"You didn't sound sorry. Again."
"Again?"
"Again."
"I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry. Please believe me, I'm sorry."
"Na. Where are the CAPITAL LETTERS? And the exclamation marks? You're not sorry enough, you sorry excuse for a person."
"Okay, okay, I'm SORRY! I'M REALLY TERRIBLY AWFULLY SORRY! I MEAN IT!"
"You're really sorry?"
"(Sobbing) Yes. I mean, YES!"
"Aw. That's all right, then."

So you're on the bestseller list? Hmmm..

From Luise Hoffman's interview with Nury Vittachi:

"[Vittachi] warns that best-seller lists cannot always be trusted, particularly in Asia. "The gentleman who writes the Hong Kong bestseller list once met me at a party, and he said, 'My company wants a discount of all your books,' and I said, 'I'm a writer, I can't do that sort of thing, talk to the publisher,' and he got in a terrible huff and the next day, all my books were off the bestseller list, but his bookshop kept ordering them in, so after about three or four weeks, we actually sold out of books.
"But that week, I met him at a party, and I said, 'It's a bit mean, to take us off the bestseller list,' and he said, 'Yes, it was mean, I'll put you back.' The next bestseller list, I was number 1, 2 and 3, but all the books had sold out. So that's the fantasy of bestseller lists in Asia."

Kind of reminds me of how a highly respected magazine in India was reputed to compile its bestseller lists: a lowly sub-editor was drafted to call bookstores and ask what was selling best that week. Depending on the sub-editor's literary abilities, this could lead to interesting results. Like the time Arun Roy's Goat of Small Things was declared the number one bestseller in India, and the time Akram Seth's A Suitable Boor was doing so well, according to the bookshops. Of course, some harried editor usually caught the errors. But I still have happy memories of the time Salman Rushdie's Morse List Sigh sneaked by the editor's blue pencil and made it to the top of the charts.

Vittachi also explains the problems inherent in translating his Feng Shui detective series into other languages:

It's about two characters," Nury explains, "a Feng Shui master who is an archetype of Asian-ness and a young Australian assistant, and they are forced to work together by circumstance. So one of the protagonists is Asian, he's very elderly, he's very racist, he's very sexist, he learnt English out of a textbook and he likes to eat small animals, alive if possible.
"The other character is female, young, very light on politically, and a vegetarian."
So of course, it's logical that the pair have some fundamental problems with communication. "Mr Wong learnt English out of the same textbook I did, and he thinks English people say things like 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating,' 'it is raining cats and dogs,' but in fact this Australian girl comes into his office and he can't understand her at all, until he works out that the word for 'yes' is 'whatever', and the word for 'no' is 'as if.'.. No English language textbook in the world, I guarantee, explains those very important words.... so how do translate that into French?"