The Oscar for Best Fabrication - NYTimes.com

Connecticut Civil War Battle Flag

The Oscar for Best Fabrication - NYTimes.com

I'm with Maureen Dowd on this, and with Lincoln, who is quoted (by Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney) as saying, ‘Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.’

Bards, poets and novelists, from Homer through Shakespeare to Gore Vidal or anybody writing today, have always gleefully distorted history when they chose to produce more pleasing fiction. Thus a neatly coherent and conclusive fiction, especially one that fits our prejudices, becomes our substitute for the real, messy and far more complex events of real history.

Was there really a Trojan War, and were its heroes really that heroic? Was Richard III really that bad? If we are using history just to tell a good story, and if the history is very remote from our daily lives, maybe it doesn't matter. Especially since Richard III's descendants are not likely to sue the heirs or producers of Shakespeare. Or the descendants of Menelaus, however miffed they may be. But if we are using fiction to teach history, especially about something that is still a hot current issue, like slavery, then it matters.

I'm happy to leave Tony Kushner's screenplay the way he wrote it, but I think it would be good for high school teachers to make students aware of the distortion. Not because this historical detail (whether they were Connecticut or Illinois senators who voted "Nay" on abolition) is so terribly important (except perhaps to Connecticutians), but because it can help make the students more wary consumers of movies, novels and other political mythmaking.

Getting back on track

Lawrence and camel, from Jordan Jubilee
(Photo is probably fake, like Lawrence.)

Hi, everybody. We're back from our travels and I am now resuming work on my novel. The trip to Israel was a major detour, which then led me into other byroads (readings and discussions related to the region, some of which I've mentioned in my blog) taking me far off the track. To show how far afield I've wandered, I even got into T. E. Lawrence's version of his terror campaign against the Ottoman empire, partly because I wanted to re-read his descriptions of Wadi Rum (he writes it "Rumm") and the breakup of that territory. All of it fascinating, and possibly material for a future novel or short story or several essays, but marching to Damascus in 1918 or Jerusalem in 1947 (with Amos Oz) is not going to get me any closer to Paris, 1871. I still owe my readers reviews of some of this material, including the short novel by Oz, another one by Israel's Nobel-prize winning Agnon, David Grossman's sensitive (but dated) reportage on the occupied territories, and Lawrence's tendentious and fascinating tale of his adventures — bloody, comical and homo-erotic by turns — and self-acknowledged treachery of the Arabs. And then I want to drop the subject, at least for a while.

Meanwhile…

Monument aux victimes des Révolutions, construit dans le square Samuel-de-Champlain le long du Père-Lachaise, avec les pierres originales du mur. (Wikipedia)

Back on track, since I'm the only one imposing deadlines on myself, I've decided generously to extend this one. I now propose to finish my draft of the novel about Paris by my birthday, in April. This is to give the concept of "deadline" a more literal sense, though maybe I should call it a "lifeline". Anyway, a birthday is a convenient marker. I'll tell you more as it develops. So far I have my main characters and the story thread — though not its conclusion — clearly in mind, which is a good start.

Daily lives and cruel choices under occupation

Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women by Jo Glanville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

These twelve stories are diverse in every way but one: they are all by women whose lives have been distorted by the loss of a homeland they can call their own, whether their own remembered loss or that of their elders. Some of the authors are exiles too young to have known Palestine and who write in English, for others expulsion is a compulsive, constant memory, while some endure and write from within the occupied territories and in its language. They are all worth reading, to gain an understanding of the costs of exile and occupation, in Palestine and in other parts of the world. Those experiences present people with cruel choices of collaboration, resignation, or resistance, of saving one's livelihood and family or one's dignity. It is never clear which is the truer choice or the more honorable.

To my mind, the most affecting story is by Lina Badr, a novelist and short-story writer in Arabic, living in Ramallah (and active in cultural affairs of the Palestinian Authority), "Other cities." Jordanian-born Umm Hasan ("mother of Hasan"), mother of six, dreams obsessively of spending a few days away from little Hebron, one of the most intensely occupied and harassed towns controlled by the Israelis, to the relative freedom of Palestinian-administered Ramallah; but she is married to a totally unsupportive cousin (Abu Hasan, "father of Hasan") who has not bothered or not dared to get her the necessary Israeli papers to legalize her status in the occupied territories, and she as the wife is not permitted to apply on her own. Passage from one town to the other, though only a few kilometers apart, requires passing through multiple Israeli checkpoints, which will require credentials, and she cannot imagine leaving her six children behind — for shame and because Abu Hasan certainly wouldn't take care of them; how she manages to achieve her modest goal, and incidentally embarrass an Israeli captain who has held up the travelers out of boredom or spite, not only describes some of the multiple indignities under the occupation but also hints at the moral damage it inflicts on the occupiers.

View all my reviews

Shameful episodes in stunning prose

We bought this book in Tel Aviv last week, just days after viewing the exhibit and film Alone on the Walls about the heroic but ultimately failed struggle of residents of Jerusalem's "Jewish Quarter" against the assault by overwhelming forces of the Arab Legion and other Arab armies. A few dozen young men with small arms and lots of ingenuity, aided by women, children and the elderly, managed to hold off the siege for 150 days, from December 1947 to final surrender in May 1948. It is a powerful, moving story, documented by a photojournalist who, in disguise, accompanied the Jordanian troops and was able to get close to the attackers and, after the defeat, to the defeated.

But the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, like all wars, was morally complicated. This famous book by a prolific and highly respected Israeli novelist probes actions of Israeli forces that cannot inspire pride, and that help explain the deep pain and anger of Palestinians today.

Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Published (in Hebrew) in 1949, just months after the events it describes, this was the first novel to (as the author himself described it years later) "[lay] bare the original sin of the State of Israel": the forcible, violent expulsion, killing, and razing of the homes of Palestinian villagers whose ancestral lands happened to fall on the Israeli side of the 1948 partition — the expulsion that Palestinians remember as the Nakba or "Catastrophe." Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky) was a Sabra, born in Eretz Yisrael (in Rehovot) in 1916, 31 years before there was a state of Israel. He writes with an understanding of his Israeli character's psychology from the inside, which makes his portrait of a young Israeli soldier on a mission of what we would now call "ethnic cleansing" sharply, shudderingly convincing. The IDF detail assigned to erase the village of Khirbet Khizeh in the 1948 war is supposed to believe that they are acting in self-defense, that the villagers are all potential terrorists. But as the day of shooting at and sometimes killing fleeing men, mindlessly slaughtering farm animals, terrorizing women, children and old men too infirm to run, and blowing up houses continues, with no sign of an enemy weapon or hostile reaction anywhere, the soldier wonders what in his God's name he and his fellows are doing if not recreating the Jews' own history of exile.

"All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like . . ."

But the young soldier does not bring himself to resist an order, and he does not dare to appear soft or Arab-loving to his comrades, so ever more reluctantly he continues with his squad until the village and its lives are totally destroyed. But his shame continues to haunt him. The book was a best-seller in Israel when re-issued in 1964 and was for a time required reading in high schools. Its merit is not merely its denunciation of "the original sin" but also its exquisite description of landscape, people, sensations and the doubts of the young soldier. It reads brilliantly in this translation by Nicholas de Lange; it must be wonderful in Hebrew.

For another review, thoughtful and seemingly well-informed, see Jacqueline Rose's "rereading" from the Guardian.

View all my reviews

Jordan's desert vastness and ancient cities

Photo by G. Fox, 4 January 2013

As you see, it was quite a journey to the great desert canyon of Wadi Rum, where caravans have passed and Bedouins have trekked, warred and trafficked for ages, and where T. E. Lawrence based his operations during part of the guerrilla war against the Ottomans, 1917-18. And where much of the movie about him, "Lawrence of Arabia," was filmed more than 50 years ago. 

We had three priority destinations in Jordan. First, the mosaic map in Madaba; next and more important, the ancient city, or cemetery, or whatever it was, of Petra, and finally, this amazing canyon, Wadi Rum. 

The mosaic floor map in Madaba, 25 km southwest of Amman, was originally composed of over two million tesserae by Greek-speaking Christians between 1540 and 1570. The map disappeared under the rubble of the razed church in the Persian conquest of 1614, until the surviving central portion was "rediscovered in 1884, during the construction of a new Greek Orthodox church on the site of its ancient predecessor." (Wikipedia: Madaba Map). Check out another site, Sacred Destinations, for more images, especially of the central portion showing the major buildings of Jerusalem at that time. At the top you can read (in Greek letters) "HAGIAPOLISIEROUSA…", i.e., "Holy City Jerusa…," all run together as one word and missing the last tessarae, which must have been LEM. It's the oldest surviving map of the city, and its scale and depictions are amazingly accurate for 6th century cartography.

Al Khazneh or The Treasury at Petra

Not much more to see in Madaba, at least for us non-Arabic speakers, so we moved on quickly to Petra. This city in a desert canyon had been settled by 1550 BCE, was built up with elaborate temples and a controlled water supply by the Nabateans beginning around 312 BCE, was further developed by Greek and then Roman conquerors, some of whom left great tombs for themselves, and was not abandoned until a major earthquake destroyed many buildings and its water system in 363 CE ("Common Era," what Christians call "AD").   We trudged all over — the site is immense — and climbed to some impossible heights to stand on ancient altars, got rooked by some charming, thieving Bedouin children (we foolishly exchanged their euros for dinars, confused by their smiles into thinking the bills were of equivalent value). After a few hours we were too exhausted to face the trek back to the entrance, and took the "desert taxis" — a Bedouin-guided horse for Susana, a donkey for me. Here is my photo of "the Treasury," just to prove I was there — you'll find many better images on the 'net, if you haven't been there yet.

For me, though, the high point of our Jordan visit was not a city but a building-free desert canyon of shifting sands, great craggy rocks, changing colors and more Bedouins — especially our young adult hosts and guide. This will be for my next note. The intersection of geology and humanity made a deep impact on me, as it had on Col. Lawrence and on almost everyone else who has seen Wadi Rum. 

Thanks to Eva Borsody for pointing me to Guy Delisle's illustrated narrative, Chronicles of the Holy City.  This review by Rupert Christiansen will give you some idea — from the sample and description, it looks great. Delisles lived there for moret han a year and knows the city much better than we could, but his amazement and perplexity at the enormous contradictions were much like our own. I'll get to our Jerusalem experience in a future note — after Wadi Rum.

In the holy lands

Armored dove on the separation wall — a Banksy production

Susana and I returned home to Spain on Sunday, after our two-week exploration of Israel, the West Bank, and a little bit of Jordan. I'll be telling you more about our experiences over the next few days; it was too much for a single brief note on a blog, and too much to assimilate so quickly.

We met with Bedouins in Jordan, Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank, and with Israeli Jews, including some dear friends from the past and a few newer friends on both sides of the ugly separation wall. Meanwhile, here is a story we've been following and which illustrates the gross failure of the Netanyahu policies.

Israel removes Palestinian protest camp outside Jerusalem - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper

More on this in the next few days, and on our conversations with Jews and Arabs, and on the books we have been reading — David Grossman, Amos Oz, Agnon, Yizhar, a collection of stories by Palestinian women, and even T. E. Lawrence.  Shalom and Salaam alaikum.

Travels with Kindle

We've begun the year AD 2013 in the birthplace of the great myths of the West, the monotheism of the Jews and its offshoots in Christianity and Islam. This is also (according to Mayan astronomers) the beginning of the first Baktun of what must be the Fifth Creation (the Fourth Creation, as we all know, ended last December, but without dramatic consequences), an excellent time for new ventures.

Last week we were in Jordan: Madaba, Petra, and Wadi Rum. Then on Shabat we arrived in Jerusalem, where I am writing this from, of all places in this city of so many faiths, the Lutheran Guest House, quite comfortable and perfectly located in the Armenian Quarter of the old city, with a view of the Dome of the Rock Yesterday we took a tour with a Palestinian guide (not permitted to enter Jerusalem) to Jericho, Qumran and the edge of the Dead Sea, with stops at Greek monasteries precariously perched in the mountains, the spot on the Jordan River where Jesus is said to have been baptized, and got views of the Cave of Temptation (from below -- we didn't climb) and too many monstrous Jewish settlements that have taken Palestinian land and water. As we were the only tourists (our guide sometimes has as many as ten), the guide brought along his family, so we had plenty of opportunity to learn from them of life for the Palestinians in a fragmented territory with many restrictions and checkpoints. I'll be telling you more of this later; today I can't delay, because we have much more to see.

And, oh, my title: "Travels with Kindle". Inspired, of course, by Kapuscinski's "Travels with Herodotus" (you can read my review in the archives of this blog or on Goodreads). While in Jordan, I logged on and downloaded T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Wadi Rum is one of the places he stopped on his adventures, and was also the setting for a major part of the movie Lawrence of Arabia), and here I've been reading short stories by Palestinian women to help me understand the life and history here. More later.

Momentous minutiae

Nathalie Lemel

A reflection by fiction-creating colleague P. J. Royal (Historical Context and the Art of Exclusion) reminds me of how the minutiae we find in our research can give new twists or meanings to our stories. Some seemingly unimportant detail may reveal the mechanism that made people in another time and place act the ways they did. In A Gift for the Sultan, the way a man wraps his turban and whether and when he chooses to do it are not just costuming, but a whole attitude of defiance, or arrogance, or sometimes anxiety. In my present novel in progress, I'm looking for clues in daily lives of the people of Paris to explain their extraordinary behavior in the Commune of 1871. What made so many ordinary, working-class Parisians, men an women, risk everything — and ultimately, most of them, lose everything — for it? And just what was it they thought they were defending?

The disastrous (and utterly unnecessary) war with Prussia and the huge French casualties; the winter-long siege and bombardment of their city, along with the paralysis of production, employment and income and the shortage of food; the sense of national humiliation before Prussia and of betrayal first by their Emperor and then by a new government that promised only greater exploitation and the elimination of hard-earned rights; and the anxiety produced by all this and so little expectation of relief — these were all components for combustion of a large, proud, densely populated city, suddenly abandoned by its government and police forces. Without knowing any more, we might expect riots, crime, vandalism. Instead, we see a social revolution where hitherto unknown men and women rose to police the city, maintain the roads, hospitals and schools and keep the factories and commerce functioning, all the while fighting to defend it and making all major decisions even as to military defense by majority vote, for a few weeks from March 18 to the end of May, «au temps des cérises», spring 1871.

Why, I wonder, were bookbinders so prominent? Not only the energetic and audacious Eugène Varlin and the woman he encouraged in the leadership in the bookbinders' union he created, the equally amazing Nathalie Lemel. There were many others, now anonymous, among the most active communards. Was there something about the way they used their hands and all their senses in their craft that made them especially quick to react and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances? Or was it mainly their contact with books that enabled them to envision a better world?    

And the other crafts. What about all those metalworkers who died at the barricades? And seamstresses? Hands and hand skills, hearts, neighborhoods, trade affiliations — everything is relevant when your fighting with all you have and for all your worth. Every known detail I discover helps me imagine the others.

Blog Hop … The Next Big Thing

A day late and a dollar short. I was supposed to do my "Blog Hop" entry yesterday, but things happened — including, believe it or not, a visit by Omar Sharif to our little fishing village in Almería (Spain), where he filmed part of "Lawrence of Arabia" 50 years ago! But back to this blog hop.

Me reading at a local bookstore, Librería Nobel in Vera, Spain

Mary Tod tagged me for this "hop" which somebody (we don't know who) started and called THE NEXT BIG THING. The idea is for each author to answer 10 questions about a work in progress (WIP) or recently published book, and then tag other authors to do the same the following week. 

What is your book's title?
 
A Gift for the Sultan takes place in and around Constantinople in 1402, when that city was under ferocious siege by the Ottomans. I've already written here previously about its development, but answering these ten questions may be a good way to sum up the experience. My new novel, or WIP, is too fresh to talk about and as yet has not found its title.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I had just completed a nonfiction book on social issues in the U.S. (Hispanic Nation, University of Arizona Press) and was ready for something completely different. On a visit to Istanbul and from there into the interior of Turkey, I was deeply impressed by the rich mix of cultures and overlapping histories of successive invaders and settlers, especially the long period of uneasy co-existence between the Greek-speaking, urbanized Christians and nomadic, newly Islamized Turks. And while reading up on that history, I was surprised to learn two facts. First, that Christian emperors and satraps had frequently offered their daughters in marriage to Turkish chieftans in order to buy peace. What, I wondered, would that sudden immersion in an utterly alien culture be like for the young Christian bride? Second, that under the terrible stress of bombardment and isolation, the ruler of Constantinople was prepared to surrender the city to the Sultan, but, afraid of the reaction of the populace, he had to carry out his negotiations in utter secrecy.  What were the many tensions within that city?  I was also thinking of the more recent siege of Sarajevo by Orthodox Serbs and other cities under stress.

What genre does your book fall under? 

It is being marketed as "historical fiction", but it is really, or also, a sociological study of the shifting alliances and betrayals that emerge when two powerful cultural systems — in this case, urban Greek-speaking Christians and Ottoman Muslims — collide. The fictional characters are closely patterned on real social types of that place and time, and everything I have invented is something that really could have happened that way. But "historical sociological fiction" is too unwieldy a label, so let's leave it as "historical fiction".   

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

A Turkish translation of the book has just been published in Istanbul. I will be delighted if some Turkish filmmaker or TV producer takes it on, and casts some dashing, dark, 30-ish actor (there are several who might be available) as the Turkish warrior who is supposed to deliver the princess to the Sultan; a pretty young woman who can pass for the adolescent Greek princess who suddenly finds herself among the rough Turkish horsemen; and some good comic actors for the parts of the Christian merchant trying to profit from this new event, the English mercenary palace guard, and the various other Turkish, Greek and other personalities. 

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

A great city calls on all its resources — magical, military and monetary —to survive assault by a powerful urban force.

But there is another story, of special interest to  the readers of the Turkish translation The supremely arrogant sultan Bayezid, called "Thunderbolt" ("Yildirim" in Turkish), meets his downfall at the hands of the very astute, chess-playing war chief from Samarkand, Timur (Tamerlane). Even today, families in Turkey frequently name their sons Yildirim or Timur. 

Is your book self-published or trade published? (The original form of this question said "or represented by an agency?")  

Oddly enough, the answer is "Both". I published it myself in English in 2010. A major Istanbul publisher, Nokta Yayıncılık Dağıtım ve Pazarlama, then purchased translation rights and published it last month (November 2012).   

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

A very long time. The original idea came to me on that first trip to Turkey in 1997. But I knew almost nothing about Turkey or what we call the Byzantine empire, their languages or customs, or the details of their long, involved history. I put the work aside several times and wrote other things (several short stories, journalistic articles), but I was too intrigued by the story to abandon it. I now know an awful lot about those peoples and their history, and even began studying Turkish. I completed the draft in 2008 or 2009.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I'm not modest. I'll say Tolstoy's War and Peace, for its interplay of sociology and history, and also certainly Albanian author Ismail Kadaré, The Siege. 

Who or What inspired you to write this book? 

My experience in Turkey, as described above, and also my reading of the news. I think there is much to be learned from this momentous conflict about Muslim-Christian relations today, and about the terrible fear and rage against urban civilization that motivates much of contemporary terrorism. 

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?  

A very gallant, though very superstitious Ottoman warrior, and a bold and perky young Christian princess rebelling against the fate designed for her. And many dramatic and some quite comic scenes. 

 ∞∞∞∞∞

And here are some of the other blog-hopping authors you'll want to check out:

Jan Alexander is a fiction writer and financial journalist, currently putting finishing touches on a fantastical, satirical novel about New York, the new China, and the process of fictional creation. She plans to tell you all about it next week (December 12) on the blog of a small collective of writer-editors that she co-founded, http://thothbooks.blogspot.com.es/ 

Mary Tod, who "tagged" me for this post, is a writer of historical fiction whose blog has just that title: http://awriterofhistory.com/author/awriterofhistory/ Thanks, Mary, for the invitation to the blog hop.

Sophie Schiller is a writer of historical fiction and spy thrillers. She has a recent book called Transfer Day. Her own blog is at  http://sophieschiller.blogspot.com

Richard Sutton has written two novels, The Red Gate and Gatekeepers about the O'Deirg family and the ancient secret they are charged to protect. He blogs at  http://www.sailletales.com

Kirstie Olley lives in Australia and calls herself a speculative fiction writer. And she is pleased to have completed NaNoWriMo. She blogs at http://www.storybookperfect.com/.

Musings : Shadow Dimensions: Plato's Cave, Wayang Kulit & the Literary Endeavor

Add caption

A reflection from a very thoughtful colleague. I loved her shadow-puppet analogy to the characters we create in our fiction. I think all of you, fellow writers and readers, will enjoy this.

Humble Musings of a Literary Kind: Shadow Dimensions: Plato's Cave, Wayang Kulit & the Literary Endeavor

And along the same lines, some of the shadow beings that populated Dickens' brain, and from there to ours.

Image at top: Shadow theater (more information at this site)
Dickens and his characters from New York Public Library Print Collection