BBC News - The Nobel and the ignoble

The big news is that Mario Vargas Llosa finally has been awarded the Nobel Prize. But while reading the BBC account of that, I came across this oddity:

BBC News - Guayabera shirt now official Cuban formal dress code

And these people still think of themselves as “revolutionary”. And who do you suppose is going to iron the things?


As an unrelated item, Vargas Llosa's recognition gives me great satisfaction. I often disagree with him politically, but I respect his serious engagement with politics even if from erroneous neoliberal premises. Most of all, I admire his art and tremendous industry in producing novels that show a rich, complex world far beyond his doctrine or mine.

When I think about V LL and me, I am reminded of Pablo Neruda's late poem “El enemigo” about an encounter with an old ideological adversary. It ends…

Allí estabamos cada uno

con su certidumbre afilada

y endurecida por el tiempo

como dos ciegos que defienden

cada uno su oscuridad.

And there we were, each one / with his certainty honed / and hardened by time / like two blind men, each defending / his incomprehension.

(That's rather loose, but “incomprehension” is closer to Neruda's meaning than “obscurity”. Perhaps “lack of clarity” is closest, except it's too wordy.) 

Other gifts for other sultans

While googling for my book's title, I came across the charming and informative article by Peter English.

Saudi Aramco World : A Gift for the Sultan

The sultan in question is Murad (or Murat) III, nearly two centuries later than the one who figures in my novel, but this is a fascinatingly detailed account of an incident in British and Ottoman diplomacy.

I've also just discovered another novel with the same title as mine, A Gift for the Sultan, published nearly 50 years ago and described as “the intimate novel of a young girl sold into slavery.” According to a reviewer, it is “Based on the true story of Helen Gloag, a Scottish girl that will become the wife of the Sultan of Morocco, after being captured by wild pirates and sold as a slave. Interesting details of the life of the Sultan's court and Middle Eastern culture.” Not my story, and not the same sultan.

There's no end of stories about “gifts” to some sultan or other, usually a girl for the harem, as in Colin Falconer's novel The Sultan's Harem, 1992: “Hurrem, a young, red-headed nymph was "imported" by a prince or "Pasha" of the empire as a gift for the Sultan along with other girls.” (From a reader's review). 

The one in my novel is Yildirim Bayezid, the first Ottoman to assume the Arabic title sultan, which he thought would give him more prestige than the traditional Turkish khan. And the “gift” here is the city of Constantinople itself, whose ruler is willing to surrender because…

But read the novel. Especially if you're interested in the history of Muslim-Christian conflicts and connivances, which become quite complicated when money was/is involved.

Labors of self-promotion

I've just spent the whole day updating (and renaming) my website, now called Fiction & Social Thought (I thought it would be too confusing to have two "Literature & Society" pages).  Please take a look and let me know what you think. It was time for an overhaul, especially now that I have a new novel out.

And for those few of you who have read it in advanced copies, now that it is at Amazon, be the first (or the second or the third) to review it! Please!

P.S. The image of the book cover (left) sometimes comes up and sometimes doesn't. If not, try refreshing your screen.

Walter James Miller Obituary

I just learned of the death of my dear friend and mentor. He was always encouraging of my work, and I had hoped to share with him my new novel. Even in his nineties, he remained active as a writer, lecturer and reader. A dear, adventurous, generous man.

Walter James Miller Obituary: View Walter Miller's Obituary by New York Times

Among many other things, he did several ambitious translations from the French. This is one of them.

Review agenda

I just got my 1st Kindle — a gift from my beloved accomplice, an anticipatory reward for getting my novel published. And for starters (I'm still learning to use the thing) I've loaded it with Jonathan Franzen, Freedom and Marcy Dermansky, Bad Marie, which I intend to read and remark upon here. But first I have to get through the pile of other, old-fashioned printed books I'm committed to review. So here then is the rough schedule of what to expect in coming weeks, in order of schedule (I'm not a speed reader, and I like to take time to write these things, so I'm not promising any deadlines):

1. Euclides Da Cunha, Backlands : the Canudos Campaign, trad. Elizabeth Lowe (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).  I've finished reading this big (476 pp.), complex and immensely famous work of Brazilian history, anthropology and geography (not to mention phrenology, a theme for da Cunha), but I'm not yet ready to give you my thoughts on it because I first want to finish another immensely famous and important book, 
2. Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo (Madrid Spain: Punto de Lectura, 2008). English translation by Helen R. Lane, The War of the End of the World. This is a big (921 pp.), ambitious novel based on these same events, the resistance to the death of thousands of extremely poor, backlands fanatics to the then-new Brazilian republic and its army, 1895-97. I plan to post the review of this book on the Spanish-language blog, but for Literature & Society I want to reflect on these two books together, what they tell us about Brazil and what they can teach us from these two very different approachs (da Cunha's and Vargas Llosa's) to telling a similar story. Maybe next week I'll have this thought through to share with you.
3. Karen Kerschen, Violeta Parra: By the Whim of the Wind (Albuquerque: ABQ Press, 2010).  For a  change of pace, though not of continent. I'm eager to read this bio of Chile's famous composer, performer and artist (and part of a family of famous artists) whose most famous song, "Gracias a la vida",  became a kind of theme for those of us defending Chile in its long, dark night of Pinochetism. Probably in about 2 weeks (no promises, though — things happen, and I'm going to be very busy promoting my own new novel, so it could take longer).

Then I can turn to other works, like the two books I just downloaded onto the Kindle and Tony Judt's big Post-War. I may learn to love the Kindle, but even if I don't — real printed books are still more comfortable — it's awfully handy for somebody like me living in Spain who wants to acquire books from the States quickly and cheaply.

My one complaint so far: The Amazon library I log onto is very weak on books in languages other than English. I'll go back to the instruction book (loaded onto the Kindle) to find out how I can download books from other suppliers, such as Spanish publishers.

Scribd archives and new reader

Scribd is getting smarter. The new HTML5 platform, replacing Flash, now lets you read and move around in archived docs just the same way you read and move around on any page in your browser.

But they have started charging for downloads of archived material ($5 a day or $9 a month for unlimited downloads). Reading is still free on everything posted as a "public" document, which is almost everything. I can understand their need to generate a little revenue, but since they've given me the option, I've exempted all my docs from the archive. This means (if I've understood them correctly) that any of you can download for free my "Mermaids and Other Fetishes" (1,118 reads so far —far more than it ever got in its original print publication in Translation Perspectives) or "Liberty and People" (on Simón Bolívar's political thought) or any of the other fiction ("Hunting the Thylacine" is kind of fun) or op-eds I've placed there.

All this stuff is on my Scribd shelf. I plan to put more there soon. Take a look, and let me know if you've published things there that'll be of interest.

Guest posts

This used to be a quiet little blog, not too crowded and with only the broadest agenda: anything conceivably related to literature or society and their interaction. And up to now, almost always written by me. I was glad for Douglas C. Smyth's contribution on Venezuela, Will Chávez become a dictator?, posted in January 2007, but otherwise the only contributions by readers have been in the comments.

Now I want to invite more guest posts. A variety of voices on this blog should make it more interesting, and should make for more frequent postings.

If you would like to see some work of yours (text or image or both) published here on Literature & Society, just send me an email query (email address on profile page) with the subject "guest post" and your idea. I'll be most interested in literary reviews or a reasoned essay on any of the issues discussed here, especially the topics I've labeled as "consciousness". I'm no longer looking especially for Latin American or Spanish topics as I was in 2007, though I'm certainly not excluding them. I'll try to respond quickly.

Thanks to Kelly Diels and Dave Doolin for their Pro Blogger blog on guest posts.

Defining this blog

You've probably noted changes in the "About me" box to the right. My aim is to make my intentions clear to you and also to me; it's so easy to get distracted these days by whatever fascinating new thing comes up on the 'net that it takes effort to maintain focus.

One major editorial shift is that I'm no longer committing myself to that weekly essay on Spain. I didn't sense any great demand for it from my readers (though Dirk, as usual, made intelligent comments), so I'll shift my reflections on Spain to the other, Spanish-language blog, Lecturas y lectores. It was mainly for myself, as a way to try to understand some of the puzzling phenomena in the country where I now live. I'll leave a note here whenever something on the Spanish blog may be of interest to readers here, such as reviews of fiction.

Another thing. Somehow I've got onto a list of potential reviewers of new books, and publicists keep sending me proposals to interview authors on all kinds of things. Naturally the publicists have never actually looked at this blog to see what I do cover, so I get everything from astrology to diet to reconciliations of science with God to searches for undersea treasure. Not what I do. If you want me to critique serious fiction or something related to the topics I've listed in "About me," please do write. Otherwise don't be surprised to receive no answer. I've got other things to do.

Words that Change the World

Thanks to my son Joaquín for sending this marvelous "Radio Lab" audiofile (WNYC and NPR production) on language and how it works.

Words that Change the World

From the story of a deaf Mayan who only as an adult learned that there were words, through experiments showing how language allows us to connect discrete concepts of space, to Shakespeare's inventions from the throngs of words that clamored for entry into his brain. Listen, if you love and are perplexed by language. Columbia U.'s James Shapiro now has me reading "The Rape of Lucrece" — as a lesson in language and writing, besides all the emotions it directly talks about. He also has made me want to read his next-to-latest book, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

For more stuff on language, click on — what else? — "language" in the labels beneath this post.

A Gift for the Sultan

Finally, after years of reflection, investigation, writing, rewriting, and mind-wandering, my most ambitious work of fiction to date is about to appear! Launch early next month (October 2010).

A GIFT FOR THE SULTAN is a historical novel about the great conflict between Orthodox Christian Constantinople and the mostly Muslim Ottoman horde in 1402, a siege that the city narrowly survived (51 years before the Ottoman conquest).

It is also a sociological novel, where I try to take the reader into the minds of a whole range of actors, including the emperor and the sultan but also Turkish warriors, Frankish and English mercenaries, slave women, and a young Christian princess being sent to the sultan as part of the "gift" of surrender.

I first got the idea on a visit to Istanbul in 1997. What took me so long was, first, learning everything I could about Byzantium in this period and about the Turks, Serbs, Armenians and others who were involved, and secondly, getting the words right and constructing a complex narrative that made sense.

It will be available from Amazon and other sellers, very soon. If you would like an advance copy for review, I can send you the pdf.

(Now available)