From Mint:

Siddhartha Deb’s recommendations for the year:

When I discovered the Chilean writer Roberto Bolano last year, I was astonished by the power of his fiction. This year saw the publication of his novel, The Savage Detectives, in English and I found it to be a genuine Third World epic: funny, tender, political, impassioned and brilliant. I was also impressed by the cerebral J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year. Part fiction and part philosophy, it is at all times a provocative handbook on democracy, the modern state, and the abuse of power.
I’ve also received immense pleasure from reading two unusual detective novels. David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero is a dark and gritty exploration of post-war Japan, glimpsed in the hallucinatory aftershock of defeat and nuclear devastation. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is more upbeat but equally accomplished. A wonderful hybrid of crime novel and alternate history set in an imaginary Jewish settlement in Alaska, it is tough-guy in tone and lyrical in style. Finally, I’ve read a remarkable debut novel, Lunatic in My Head, by Anjum Hasan, set in the north-eastern town of Shillong. Steeped in memory, loss, and desire, it marks the arrival of a wonderful new talent in Indian writing.

And here are mine:

I have been reading a lot of books about war this year. Right now, I am in the middle of a wonderful memoir—Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet. Samet teaches English at West Point, and it is fascinating to read how American cadets read literature and deal with doubt.
The Abu Ghraib Effect, which I read during the summer, is a fine reminder of why scholarship matters. Written by art historian Stephen Eisenman, it shows that the demeaning poses in which American soldiers photographed Iraqi prisoners had their provenance in a 2,000-year-old tradition of Western art devoted to aestheticizing and eroticizing pain.
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was a success in the West. I would like to think it was because of the book’s artfulness and charming candour, but I wonder whether the truth might not be more crude. The suave protagonist was someone White readers hadn’t met before, a Muslim man who looked and acted differently from all those they had seen on TV.
I liked Don DeLillo’s Falling Man for its simple surprises. The performer who, in the days following the 11 September attacks, used a cable and a harness to throw himself down from tall buildings. The image caught something about how flagrant art can be. Had DeLillo intended his novel to be like that too?
I am only a few pages into Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, but even a few lines are enough to know that this is a big book. The voice of a major artist reaching into the violence and pain inside the world’s soul.

Thanks, Chandrahas

I’m off to India in a few short hours. I’m going to be lazy and use Maud’s post on James Wood and Coetzee’s latest. Miss Maud has also provided links to previous reviews that Wood has done of Coetzee’s work–and, more surprising treats, two other texts, one by Peter Brooks and another by Coetzee, dealing with confession and faith in the work of Dostoyevsky and others. I’ll read the Wood review on the plane and, once I get the chance, report back from a warmer place. If we don’t talk before that, happy holidays and Merry Christmas!

(The image above, Maud tells us, is of Dostoyevsky’s notes for chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov.)

Vijay Prashad pays tribute to Bela Malik:

Last year, I wrote an essay for CounterPunch about the Indo-US agreement. It began with the bravery of my friends Bela Malik and Tommy Mathew, whose protest in Jangpura drew the might of the US secret service and the Delhi police. Bela, an editor and teacher, went into a coma shortly afterwards. She was then in Nepal, where she threw herself into the democracy movement (for those in Kathmandu, there will be a memorial for her at Martin Chautari on the 22nd at 11am). An incandescent light, Bela slipped away on December 16, 2007. She was my first editor and a dear friend. Many years ago, we chatted about the Ghadar movement while roaming around Delhi. This essay helps me remember her humor and intelligence, and above all, her commitment.

More

Carl Bromley from Nation Books tells me that these podcasts have been giving him “hours of pleasure.” Here’s a way to learn a language–or is it a culture?–from seventies-era Hindi films.

The podcasts are offered by Arun Krishnan who has a novel coming out soon.

A few years ago I bought the CD above. Carl, I recommend it highly.

P.S. Time Out Mumbai’s Naresh Fernandes sends us another link to Bombay grooves.

P.P.S. And still more.

Jai Arjun Singh decides against the eye-roll when reading Rishi Reddi’s book of stories about Indians in America. Here’s an interview with Rishi. Via Manish.
I read with Rishi at a literary festival last month and agree with the New Yorker’s assessment that her “understated prose and her choice of details give her revelations a quiet power.”

A wonderful report on This American Life about Indian workers outsourced to Oklahoma. The details are sad and infuriating, but the story is partially redeemed by–what exactly?–human kindness, or a radical interpretation of the Bible, or our need to forget the price paid in suffering and remember only what came out right “in the end.”

Prologue.

Host Ira Glass talks to reporter John Bowe about the story of John Nash Pickle, who ran a company in Tulsa, Oklahoma that made steel tanks used in the oil industry. According to 52 Indian men whom Pickle hired and brought to America, Pickle was trying to compete with foreign companies, doing something most companies never try. Instead of simply opening a factory overseas with cheap labor, the men say, Pickle decided to run an overseas factory with cheap labor…on American soil…inside his own Tulsa Oklahoma plant. (3 minutes)

Act One. Cowboys and Indians.

We continue the story of John Pickle. He hires skilled, experienced welders in India and brings them to the United States. He takes their passports, barely feeds them, pays them half the minimum wage. And when the men protest, Pickle insists he’s helping them—doing them a favor in fact.

John Bowe’s book, in which this story appears, is called Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy. (32 minutes)

(Thanks, Soniah Kamal)

Photo: Indian workers in Kuwait

THIS WEEK: STRANGE CULTURE on Sundance Channel!
(The winner of the Marlon Riggs prize)

12/11 @ 9:35pm EST/PST *
12/13 @ 12:35am EST/PST *
12/14 @ 10:35am EST/PST *
12/16 @ 3:35pm EST/PST *

* Central & Mountain Times vary by as much as 2 hours - Check local listings.

STRANGE CULTURE, selected to open both the 2007 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and the documentary section of the Berlin International Film Festival, is directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, and features Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, Chronicles of Narnia), Peter Coyote (E.T., Erin Brochovich), Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry Fool, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride, My Dinner with Andre); Original score by The Residents.

STRANGE CULTURE details the surreal legal nightmare of artist and University at Buffalo professor Dr. Steven Kurtz. Dr. Kurtz was illegally detained and accused by the U.S. government of “bioterrorism” in 2004 after police became suspicious of common science materials used in his internationally exhibited art practice. He now awaits trial on charges of “mail fraud”—charges which carry the possibility of a 20-year jail term under the USA PATRIOT Act. Since the ongoing nature of the case prevents Dr. Kurtz from discussing its details, Hershman Leeson has enlisted actors to dramatize parts of the story, skillfully interweaving dialogue with news footage, animation, interviews, testimonials, and footage of Kurtz himself.

Trailer

“Hershman Leeson is as interested in reinventing the doc form as she is in publicizing Kurtz’s case. The director not only breaks the fourth wall, she reduces it to plaster dust.” – Variety

“…alternatively teasing and terrifying… a near perfect alignment of subject and form.” – The New York Times

“…a brilliant and moving examination of fear and its manipulations.”
– The Nation

Visit here and here

Paul Chan’s 1st Light. (2005)

Via Sughra Raza

More here and here

I’m posting this as a farewell to my students in ENG 207 who are turning in their final papers tomorrow on the art of 9/11.

George Saunders on Daniil Kharms, the Soviet absurdist writer who died during the siege of Leningrad:

Kharms’s stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they’re defective. They seem to cower at the suggestion of rising action, to blush at the heightened causality that makes a story a story. They sometimes end, you feel, before they’ve even begun. Here, in Yankelevich’s translation, is the entire text of “The Meeting”:

“Now, one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.

“And that’s it, more or less.”

Bring that into workshop! You’ll get slaughtered. Crickets will sound in the seminar room. Someone will say, “I guess I’d like to know more about the Polish bread.” No starving former lover crosses the path of our man as he brings home the bread to his own hungry family; no child needs to be pulled from the Neva; the man does not pass the open door of a shoemaker’s shop, inside of which the shoemaker is berating his wife, which makes our man contemplate his own troubled marriage, as he has a meaningful flashback to his honeymoon, crushing the bread in sudden angst.

A well-written review makes me aware of a writer’s work but also engages me in a discussion about the rules for writing. That is what George’s remarks on narrative did to me this morning. And that’s also the pleasure I found in reading, in the same issue of the NYTBR, a review by Michael Gorra of Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson:

Most readers will spend the book’s first chapter trying to locate themselves in relation to its “you” — the “you” that implies a largely absent “I.” Although later chapters will bring Betsy’s own circumstances more fully to the foreground, Landsman’s shifting pronouns are what gives this book its febrile and uncanny life, in which the barriers between self and other appear at moments to dissolve. Betsy’s persistent invocation of “you” allows her to comment and question and judge, to conduct a conversation in which her father’s physical silence matters not at all, so vocal does he seem in her mind. In that conversation, Landsman makes us see Harold Klein with a clarity she could not have achieved in a more conventional first- or third-person account.

daniil-kharms-michael-gorra-anne-landsman

In the London Review of Books, Jeremy Harding writes about a “gripping little book” entitled Reporting Iraq. I’ve ordered the book this morning, drawn by the idea of this being an oral history offered by the journalists, about the work they were doing and also, of course, about the place they were working in. (If one thinks of journalists’ accounts about life in Iraq, of the books I’ve read Rajiv Chadrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City is the one that presents the most vivid portrait of the hubris of the Bush administration, from Bremer down to his twenty-year-old minions in Baghdad–the latter given responsibilities like managing budgets of $13 billion because, having served as foot-soldiers in the Republican election campaigns, they had had the gumption to send in their resumes to a conservative think-tank or two.)

Harding begins with a discussion of images by photographer Chris Hondros of Getty Images. The photo above is a recent one that Hondros took in the Diyala Province.

reporting-iraq