Alexander Masters is the author of Stuart: A Life Backwards. The book is about Stuart Shorter whom Masters had first met while the former was begging on the street in his hometown in England. This description captures nothing of the tension and the wit present on each page of this absolutely brilliant work. (More of such prose about the book: “First published in Britain, Stuart: A Life Backwards won both the Guardian First Book Award and the Hawthornden Prize, and it was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Whitbread Biography Prize. Celebrated author Zadie Smith said, ‘It’s been years since I’ve been so delighted by a book.’”)

Masters visited my class yesterday. I had told my students beforehand that I wanted them to pay special attention to this writer because his book teaches us how to be compassionate without being pious. (In fact, the first draft of the book had to be junked on the advice of the subject himself because he found it too earnest. And this is the book’s triumph. It engages with issues that are deeply political but still remains funny.) However, there in class, with the writer present at the seminar table, I found myself telling my students more about how wonderfully Masters had structured the book and how precise and restrained all his revelations were. There are many pages from Stuart that I’m just going to have to tear out from the book and stick on the walls of my study so that I can remind myself when I write about the pure pleasure of narrative.

Here is the New Yorker on the book:

Masters’s tragicomic portrait of Stuart Shorter, an “ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath” whom he befriended while studying at Cambridge University, starts in the present and moves backward. Through the particulars of a fractured life, including stays in seventeen prisons and a parking garage, Masters hopes to answer Stuart’s question “What murdered the boy I was?” Masters is candid about his exasperation with Stuart—he confesses at one point to feeling “sated” with his subject’s troubles—and achieves a perfect balance of empathy and comedy. The real attraction, however, is Stuart’s own voice, as when he recalls “getting rageous” or offers recipes for “prison hooch” and “convict curry.” His life resists easy explanation, which makes Masters’s patient attention to its concrete details all the more affecting.

My thanks to my colleague Jacki Musacchio who invited Masters to the Vassar campus.

alexander-masters-stuart-a-life-backwards

Fahamu Pecou
The Tipping Point, 2006
acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 72″ x 54″

Via

Robin Varghese on the trial of Saddam Hussein. He writes that the self-delusions of the deposed Iraqi dictator as well as the self-deception of the coalition forces “do offer lessons … but these seem hard to articulate”:

Maybe it was the constant invocation of the Nazis as an analog for Saddam, but part of me was hoping that out of the coverage of the trial would come the sort of reportage that Hannah Arendt filled the pages of The New Yorker with during the trial of Adolph Eichmann, pieces which became the basis of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

There were enough parallel issues: the legitimacy of the court trying Saddam; the attempt to have the horrors of Iraqi Ba’athism become the foundation myth (in the sense of mythic, not in the sense of false or not true) which would create a continuity between the peoples of Iraq and a new Iraqi polity; the issue of complicity of Shi’a and Kurdish leaders, the West, the East bloc, China, the rest of the Arab world; the Pontius Pilate like reaction of much of the world to the trial; the nature of international law, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Moreover, there is a tale to be told of the hope and tragic descent into corruption and brutality of much of the post-colonial experience, a trajectory and narrative captured only on occasion and waiting to be captured in the form of the political theory-cum-reportage that Arendt deployed so well. Eichmann in Jerusalem, whatever its limitations, help us to understand something about modernity, the officialese of modern bureaucracy and ethics.

In Saddam Hussein and the experience of Ba’athism in Iraq, I imagine a similar tale could be told of the colonial aftermath, the Cold War, and the devolutions into thuggery

robin-varghese-saddam-trial-hannah-arendt

Last week, when I had blogged about child soldiers I had also meant to provide a link to the very wonderful Jenny Diski’s thoughts entitled “Jungle Clearings” (thanks to Maud Newton for discovering Diski’s website; this way, one gets to read Diski more often than the LRB allows access to her witty, acerbic mind):

If the world was a less excruciating, less incorrigibly awful place for most people to be, there might be a case to be made for taking it seriously. Just a glimmer of the possibility of doing something about any of it, would justify making that the centre of your life. As it is, sincerity seems at best naive, more likely self-righteously and pointlessly pious. (Just reinvented the wheel there: the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.) So I think now, after so many years of watching very little improve, unless you count the freedom to fuck on TV a great humane breakthrough. It’s not cynical to be cynical, it’s perverse not to be.

Still, I remember marching from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square at sixteen, half of me thinking that so many people must have some effect, and the other half knowing absolutely that at best I was just making myself feel good. Exactly divided. I confess I still am astonished (while 50% of me knows better) that the voiced dissent against the invasion of Iraq could be entirely ignored, that the scandal of lies, evasions, claims to having god’s ear and the corruption of those who both bombed and made money out of rebuilding, all just went on and on, transparent enough for an infant to see through. How can that happen? How, in full daylight, with intelligent objections, can essential individual human rights in the UK and US be whittled away in the name of guarding against an incredibly handy global something which, for entirely understandable reasons, doesn’t like us? I don’t like us either.

This morning, the radio news announced that some international negotiator had stood in ‘a jungle clearing’ and tried to persuade the leader of God’s Revolutionary Army in Uganda that the best way to get the international community to respect him more would be to release his child soldiers. I hope the negotiator moves on to jungle clearings in Washington and somewhere near Downing Street.

Photo: Eugene Richards

jenny-diski-jungle-clearings

Have a Happy Thanksgiving. I’m off till Sunday. Taking my daughter to the National Zoo. To meet the panda, Tai Shan.

Two books: Johnny Mad Dog by Emmanuel Dongala, and Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala.

We discussed both books in class today. Here’s Anderson Tepper in the Washington Post:

Though very different, both these books confront head-on a harsh reality in Africa today: children raised in — and raised by — war. And, ultimately, it’s hard for this subject not to overpower both novels, to flatten the characters, to drain the action of any subtlety. Both are full-immersion books, carried on the back like oversized guns, about the tribulations of their adolescent narrators. And both are riddled with as many questions as bullets: How can a country survive that cannibalizes its youth, that teaches them to kill, to maim, to loot? “Yet again, our [expletive] country had killed one of its children,” Laokol mourns. “What kind of country kills its children in cold blood?”

Tepper’s point about the overwhelming nature of the events and what they do to the narrative and characters is correct, I think, although another way to describe it is that it is a part it seems of the black man’s burden (”the burden of over-representation”) to have to again and again explain and indict. Unlike Anderson, I found Iweala easier to read, his book less marred by narrative flaws and also blessed by a voice that is, at first encounter, quite mesmerizing.

Drawing: Anthony Russo/Washington Post

emmanuel-dongala-uzodinma-iweala-anderson-tepper

My recent Nation review-essay about Eqbal Ahmad has been linked to the Outlook website.

Here’s a link to Ahmad’s celebrated essay “Terrorism: Theirs and Ours.”

eqbal-ahmad-civilizing-mission

Iqbal Ahmed in the Independent on a writer’s best friend:

Without independent bookshops, London would be for me what Baudelaire calls “a desert without oasis”. My love affair with bookshops began 25 years ago in Srinagar. The Kashmir Bookshop, run by a long-bearded Sikh philanthropist, was the only one selling general books in our town of half a million inhabitants. One day his assistant, Ghulam Mohammed, kindly offered me a copy of a big hardback on credit. The price of the book was over a hundred rupees. It took many people a month to earn that much money. I felt indebted to Ghulam for life.

Having contributed a brief article to the LRB a year before, I received a discount card in the post when the London Review Bookshop opened in Bloomsbury in May 2003. However, I failed to seek it out for several weeks. Then one afternoon, I ventured beyond Museum Street off Great Russell Street and found the shop in a quiet side-road. I wanted a copy of The Writer’s Handbook to avail myself of the LRB discount card. They didn’t have a copy but offered to order one for me. I had worked a few years before in a chain bookshop located on the other side of the British Museum in Bloomsbury and remembered it stocking a whole pallet of The Writer’s Handbook.

I found later that my first purchase from the London Review Bookshop was useful only in facilitating rejection letters from literary agents and publishers.

More.

(Hat-tip, Kamila Shamsie)

iqbal-ahmed-independent-booksellers-lrb-bookshop

Mary Henderson
Dinner Table, 2006
gouache on paper, image size 8″ x 6.5″

Via Lyons Weir.Ortt Contemporary Art. And Harper’s.

mary-henderson-dinner-table

Can global conflicts be settled by rock, paper, scissors? Maybe not. But organizers of a RPS tournament in Toronto this weekend want the centuries-old children’s game applied more often to settle lesser fights.

Photo: REUTERS/Mark Blinch (CANADA). Two contestants compete in the 2006 International World Rock Paper Scissors Championships in Toronto, November 11, 2006.