By The Firelight

The term stunt journalism first came into usage after 1887 when Nellie Bly wrote Ten Days in a Madhouse where she had impersonated a mad woman to get a patient’s view of a madhouse. The stunt made her famous and did bring the story to a public that didn’t know how bad the madhouses were. Since then journalists have occasionally used stunt journalism as a means to get at a story they might not otherwise get. However, the stunts have also become a end in themselves, as in the work of Hunter S. Thompson who reveled in becoming the story. The stunt journalist, though, always has something over the journalist who just sends in the 500 to 1500 word story. They have the adventure of the story and it is that adventure, whether real or manufactured by inserting one’s self into the story, that can make a stunt journalist’s work exciting and often compelling.

The risks to this kind of journalism range from distorting the story to weak prose and they are something that Nicholas Schmidle in his new book To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan manages to avoid. Yet as I read the book I couldn’t help but think I’m not reading about the ethnic tensions in Pakistan, but the adventure of placing one’s self with in those tensions. The adventure is never so clear as when he returns from southwestern Pakistan, Balochistan, and he us traveling along a dirt road at night worried about bandits and realizing the police escort he had started with has dwindled to one truck with police officers armed with sticks. Schmidle is in great danger, a danger that highlights the problems of Pakistan and yet what is the story? Is it Pakistan or is it him? Is it the thrill of the car through the Pakistani night or is it the depressing ethnic strife that is always threatening to destroy Pakistan?

If you answer both then you have the book, because it is both and that is its strength. Part history, part journalism, part danger tourism To Live will depress with its endless problems, some known, others seldom reported. Of particular note is the ethnic tensions between the Punjabis, Pushtus, Balochis, and Sinds. Lost in the reports of the Taliban in the Swatt Valley are the constant tensions that have racked the country and which the government seems to have little interest in stopping when riots flare up. From what Schmidle says it is a wonder that Pakistan still exists. Add in the Taliban and the ever present state security services who seem obsessed with looking good and thwarting India, and you have the most dysfunctional state. What you hear in the news is even worse on the ground.

Schmidle offers some interesting reporting on the Taliban and the collapse of the traditional power structures in the tribal areas, noting that the Taliban are not a new form of the old tribal system, but a replacement that exterminates any opposition, including the tribal leaders. Yet despite the danger and the brutality, Schmidle meets with fundamentalist leaders and brings a humanizing face to them. He doesn’t do it because he believes in them nor trusts them, but to show how they could gain so many followers despite their positions that are so inimical in the west.

The friendships, too, are part of the adventure. He is honest in describing his feelings and in this sense the book is very good. But the question about what is a stunt and what is reporting still remains. Any act of reporting puts oneself if the story, even if peripherally, but does the story behind the story over take the story? In To Live occasionally it does, but in the I centric world of media it certainly is a light touch and no where near as purple as Dexter Firkins Forever War. Schmidle has managed to write a solid account of his time in Pakistan and if the story is subsumed in his story it is only because those are the demands of the solitary journalist.

The Los Angles Times has a good review of The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. I’ve seen other reviews of the book (if I was a better blogger I would actually link to it) and they were all good. The book is an interesting mix of history and story telling that ranges over the last 60 years of Columbian and European history:

“The Informers” is narrated by Gabriel Santoro, a Bogotá reporter and author of a book that recounts the life story of a Jewish German immigrant named Sara Guterman whose family was one of many to escape to Colombia during the early years of Nazism. The primary distinction of “A Life in Exile,” this book within a book, is the review it receives from Santoro’s identically named father. The elder Santoro, a professor with a reputation as the moral conscience of the embattled nation, inexplicably savages the book in a prominent newspaper.

When his son confronts him, the scholar elaborates on his dismissal: “Memory isn’t public. . . . [T]hose who through prayer or pretense had arrived at a certain conciliation, are now back to square one. . . . you come along, white knight of history, to display your courage by awakening things . . . you and your parasitical book, your exploitative book, your intrusive book.”

The plot gets more complicated as it goes on and you’ll have to read the review to see more, but Adam Mansbach’s conclusion should make that an easy decision.

Vásquez is a hugely skilled writer, his prose weighted with authority and carefully observed detail, and he is a dexterous weaver of voices and time periods. “The Informers” fares best when he allows his protagonist to stay in the moment, to build scenes instead of imagining wide swaths of the past. The journalist’s visit to Enrique Deresser is gripping: revelatory and elusive, understated and devastating. Sara Guterman’s recollection of an explosive 1943 dinner the Deressers held for a Nazi named Bethke is deeply dramatic, rife with tension and complexity. The emotional impact of such scenes — in which a nation’s unresolved pain is distilled, writ small, in the actions of a single man or the volleys exchanged over a dinner table — hints at the power of which Vásquez is capable.

I used to read DC war comics when I was younger, finding even then the superhero comics less than interesting. Which is not to say that if drug my copies of those comics out of the closet I might not find them insipid. Yet there was a reality to them that was more than real, less trapped in the generic conventions of super heroes which despite the fans of the genre who see a larger world reflected in them are still a let down when reading. I can still remember when one of the crew from the haunted tank in G.I. Combat was killed by a strafing airplane.

I mention this because the New York Times has an article about the reworking of the Unknown Soldier series from Vertigo and DC. In this reworking the Unknown Soldier takes place in Uganda and explores the civil war and its atrocities. It looks like tough stuff:

Unknown Soldier is unflinching in its depiction of violence, and that comes across even more strongly in the collected edition, without the monthly break between issues. One particularly horrific scene deals with the disfigurement of the title character: an inner voice navigates him through the violence, but when he reaches his breaking point, he hacks at himself to try to silence it. That gruesome episode came from Mr. Dysart’s imagination; some details he learned from his trip, he said, were too awful for the comic.

The art, too, communicates the violence in a stylized fashion and expands the work of comics as journalism that authors like Joe Sacco have created.

The New York times has a moderately sized profile of Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin. It is a little hard to say if I want to read his work, but it looks like he may becoming a little more known.

In one index of his growing international reputation, Mr. Bellatin recently signed a multibook deal with Gallimard, the prestigious French publisher, that calls for his next several works to be issued in France before they appear in Spanish in Latin America. As usual he has seized on that opportunity to make mischief: rather than publish his original manuscript here, he intends to have someone else render the French translation back into Spanish.

I will be curios to see if he creates his own language. As the quote below notes, so many writers are said to have created their own language and I find they very rarely do.

“I am enamored of and very much struck by his way of managing to condense narrative down to a very minimal form of expression, so that at his best, every word is sealed with more weight, suggestiveness, meaning and poetry,” Mr. Goldman said. “Everyone talks about inventing your own language, but he really does it. Every Mario Bellatin book is like a toy, dark, radiant and bristling, like a Marcel Duchamp construction in words.”

Some older critics in Mexico have little use for Mr. Bellatin’s transgressive style and seem flummoxed by his blurring of fiction and reality. “I try not to be involved in any literary group,” Mr. Bellatin said, noting that “my books are most warmly received not here in Mexico but abroad, in Argentina and France.”

Al Ahram weekly (via Literary Salon) has a good article about the youngish (b. 1967) Novelist Ibrahim Farghali and the evolution of post Mahfouz writing. I’m not sure if I agree with the author of the article’s implicit idea that after realism comes magical realism:

[...] Yet from a history-of-literature point of view, Abnaa Al-Gabalwi is probably the closest we have come to a fulfilment of the prophecy that a home-grown magic realist movement would emerge in the new millennium.

Such books would combine the realism and social commitment of the Sixties narrative tradition with the individualism and physicality of the Nineties (the latter thus far accommodated mainly by the prose poem). It would give substance to the notion of an “age of the novel”, espoused by critic Gabir Asfour at millennium’s end, and express a range of recent influences from Gabriel-Garcia Marquez and Jorge-Luis Borges to Umberto Eco to Jose Saramago — all of whom demonstrated how elements of the fantastical could be deployed to intensify reality and/or infuse the public realm with private experience.

That said, I think the book has some promise and certainly sounds interesting if it ever makes it into English, which it may not because it sounds very writerly.

This, basically, is the premise of Abnaa Al-Gabalwi, which nonetheless incorporates numerous other frameworks, notably the appearance of flesh-and-blood reincarnations of some of Mahfouz’s characters both in and outside their original settings, the government’s efforts to do what it can to have the books back — some people apparently know the texts by heart, others attempt to reconstruct them with the help of their knowledge of Mahfouz’s work from translations — and the very complex, gradual intermingling of the fictional world and the world to which it supposedly refers. There are not only characters but narrators, character narrators, doubles, triples, even quadruples. Subplots take on lives of their own, and there are multiple scenarios with a range of possible resolutions.

The fictional acrobatics are of such intensity they frequently if no doubt intentionally disrupt what suspension of disbelief the reader has managed to maintain, but they also undermine the book’s popular appeal and seem to have no purpose beyond themselves.

“The fictional acrobatics are an end in themselves” Farghali insists, “not a means to something else. You could put it down to taste. I like complexity in a novel. More than one time frame, more than one character, more than one voice. My wish is to alter my voice till it becomes a multiplicity of voices in the manner of the Portuguese writer Fernando PesÓo, although of course there is a huge difference and I am still a student compared to him. I managed that somewhat in previous works, I created parallel time frames, but in general I totally incline towards this kind of layering. I like The God of Small Things, for example, for that same reason.”

As in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter night’s a traveller (which is made up of novel openings), by the time you have turned the last page, you have read not a novel as such but a range of possible novels. More than any one character or story-line, you retain a sense of what an Arabic novel is, or what Farghali thinks it might be. More importantly, perhaps, you appreciate the disappearance of Mahfouz’s work as a metaphor for the general social-political malaise the book selectively and somewhat fitfully depicts: corruption, purposelessness, physical and mental repression, and the existential loss not only of the private but of the public self all come to mind. Mahfouz’s books stand in for Egypt and all it means.

I love to eat and to cook. I’ve got chef skills with the knife, can cut a mound of paper thin onion slices quickly, and think it is fun to spend a half hour sieving a sauce so that it is ever so smooth. So Julie and Julia was fun, if for no other reason than it was about food. To watch a Julia Child bio-pic was a delight: who knew that to learn to cut onions like a chef she stood in her Paris kitchen practicing until no one could enter the kitchen; or a sexual being and not just a strange older woman on TV. Meryl Streep’s performance is certainly what makes the film fun, bringing to the film a liveliness and exploratory a joy as Julia first finds French food and then strives to master it. And the food looks good…if only one could eat like that more often.

The film is more than a joyous ode to the joys of French cooking, though. There is still Julie. If Julia makes one want to eat French food or at least watch a rerun of her cooking show, Julie drags the film down with pedantic problems and frustrations that grow tiresome quickly. When she cooks things are going just fine. I want to see how she fails or succeeds (at least during the film, after I could careless). It is when she leaves the kitchen and the fights with the husband and the souless work and 9-11 intrude that the film is just banal. What is worse Julia is always there: “Julia wouldn’t have done this. How would Julia have done it? Julia was perfect.” Anyone watching it will understand she is overdoing her love of Julia, but it still isn’t that interesting to watch.

Unfortunately, Julie’s hagiography taints the Julia story. Although I know they are from different sources, the Julia story now seems too perfect and despite the fun it feels uncomfortable as if one is being feed something artificial, something other than the pure butter Julia and Julie both fetish over. As a light move, Julie and Julia succeeds, and even Julie can be funny, but Julie feels as passing as the millions of blog posts that are generated daily. I’m not sure if there is a digital equivalent of 5 seconds on the lips, 5 years on the hips, but Julie is certainly not worth the indulgence that Julia is.

The NY Times has a brief review of a new book of posters from the Lebanese Civil War. It sounds fascinating, although there are not too many photos on the web for a preview, just the one cover shot below. The article itself might be of interest if you are interested in  alternative comics such as Mad Magazine.

The visual language of rebellion has a few commonalities that are adapted to individual cultures and countries. The images in Zeina Maasri’s Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (I. B. Tauris/Palgrave Macmillan, paper, $29.95) are stylistically similar to some of the underground comics created in the ’60s. But the messages in Lebanon from the ’70s to the early ’90s were decidedly more serious than those in the United States. Underground comics were concerned with sex and drugs, among other favored themes; the Lebanese activists were concerned with survival and victory. American undergrounders faced nightsticks and Mace when they demonstrated against government policy; the Lebanese factions used lethal weapons.

This is not a picture book per se, although it is well illustrated with black-and-white and color plates. Maasri, an associate professor of graphic design at the American University of Beirut, provides a detailed analysis of the nature of graphic propaganda and of the issues Lebanon faced during its civil war, along with explanations of various symbols and motifs. The book also includes a provocative chapter on martyrdom. Most of the images reproduced here did not break any new design territory — which makes sense. They were meant to function in a cluttered visual environment amid many messages. There are the requisite portraits of martyrs and a few anti-Israel protests (one with the swastika embedded in a Star of David). But there is one poster in particular that caught my eye for its conceptual curiosity. The designer is anonymous, and it is titled “Towards Independence.” It looks pixelated, like a Whitman’s Sampler box, and depicts a figure running with a torch. In the heat of a civil war, such a well-designed composition makes it seem as if the conflict were basically the Olympic Games.

Cover Photo

At first it would seem difficult to make a film from the stories of Etgar Keret or at least difficult to make a film with a narrative thread that spanned the film and was not a series of little vignettes. Keret is known for ultra short stories, most under 3000 words, and they are usually not linked together in any discernible way. Instead, they form a chaotic reflection of the sometimes unexplainable in our lives, not a what could happen, but how you react if something similar were to occur. These reactions to things that most likely couldn’t occur—a man with wings, for instance—but illuminate emotions that are otherwise buried by the often tired social realism.

In $9.99 the film makers have continued with Keret’s focus on the unexpected, but have joined many of the stories to create several narrative threads that run throughout the film and smooth what otherwise might have been a choppy film. Even though the stories have been reworked they still contain the element of the unexpected that most manifests itself in this film as a counterweight to the dull, the weight of loneliness in modern life. One thread follows an old man who has lost his wife and is lonely, trying to talk with who ever passes by. One day he meets a man with wings who he takes for an angel. This angel is not angelic, though, but a bum who scrounges money off the old man. While it might seem like a story of a helpless old man, when the old man pushes the angel off the roof to see if he flies the story moves from the melancholy to a rejection of the simple salve the angel represents and at the same time a freedom for the old man.

The stories are always funny, if touched with melancholy and despite the dark ending of the old man and the angel the story is much lighter than it seems. It is the interplay between melancholy and humor, loneliness and hope, that makes the film good. When the unemployed son of a business man buys a book that explains the meaning of life for $9.99, the disappointment isn’t expressed in shouting, but a sadness that expresses affection and as the story of the father and son continues it isn’t the strangeness of the events but how they find release from all their disappointments that makes the film interesting. $9.99 is a great introduction to the world of Etgar Keret and the movie will surprise anyone who has not read his works with its inventiveness.

Grant Munroe at Rumpus (via Literary Salon) has an article, Searching the Library of Babel, that is recursively Borgesien in its search for a still as not yet translated work of Borges, the 33 volume The Library of Babel. It is an interesting collection, if for nothing else to see what Borges considered worth reading, an always interesting list.

I don’t know much about Amos Kenan, just what the NY Times obit says, and I have a feeling I won’t read him because I don’t have the time, but the obituary is worth the read just to get the sense of the broadness of writing in Israel. The only book that seems to be readily available in English at Amazon is The Road To Ein Harod. The times give it this brief mention:

His most successful novel was “The Road to Ein Harod,” an Orwellian mixture of history, fantasy and philosophy in which an Israeli and an Arab are thrown together after a military coup sends Israel hurtling toward fascism.

Wikipedia has a little more about Kenan.