I'm still getting a lot more site traffic over here than I am at the new blog, so I guess for a while I can post links here to new posts there while reader feeds, clicking habits, blogrolls, etc., get updated. I posted a new book review (and a totally relevant picture of a Minion action figure) over there yesterday:
Al-Andalus Rediscovered: Iberia's New Muslims
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book reviews. Show all posts
Friday, July 17, 2015
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
There's No There Halfway There
It is not a promising sign when a very serious work of literary theory starts to sound suspiciously like the academic satire of the moment, in this case, Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway and The Big Bang Theory, respectively. It is even less promising when a reader finds herself wondering whether the book isn't just an elaborate, as-yet-unrevealed latter-day version of the Sokal hoax.
At 500 pages in length, the book isn't so much tl;dr (too long; didn't read in dismissive internet parlance) as much as dr;tifmtkgwtiotwaidrwtiabdafhpbdfsohs (didn't read;too infuriating for me to keep going without throwing it out the window and I didn't really want to injure anyone by dropping a five hundred-page book down five stories onto Houston St.). In gamer parlance, I rage-quit the book. If you look at my own copy of it, my hand-written notes in the margin get progressively messier and darker as I gripped my pencil harder and harder as I read on. My comments here are, thus, restricted to my infuriated impressions of the introduction of the book rather than being a full-on book review.
At 500 pages in length, the book isn't so much tl;dr (too long; didn't read in dismissive internet parlance) as much as dr;tifmtkgwtiotwaidrwtiabdafhpbdfsohs (didn't read;too infuriating for me to keep going without throwing it out the window and I didn't really want to injure anyone by dropping a five hundred-page book down five stories onto Houston St.). In gamer parlance, I rage-quit the book. If you look at my own copy of it, my hand-written notes in the margin get progressively messier and darker as I gripped my pencil harder and harder as I read on. My comments here are, thus, restricted to my infuriated impressions of the introduction of the book rather than being a full-on book review.
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Book Review: Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language
For a book on translation out of Arabic, the irony of Abdelfattah Kilito's Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language is that the English translation distracts and detracts from the work.
I'm not crazy about the work itself: The discussion of Jahiz is useful if unoriginal and uninspired. Much of the framework appears to draw heavily upon an odd couple of the author's making: Schoeler and Derrida. The book simply doesn't add any line of inquiry or analysis that is new to anyone already well-read in the history and theory of Arabic translation. Even as he reports on Jahiz's criticism of the translation of philosophy as inherently poor because the translator can never understand the idea as well as the philosopher, the voice of Kilito the narrator reads as an inexpert guide through the material though Kilito the author and critic surely is not.
From his wonder at the writings of Hrsowitha to the concept directed to uneducated European audiences for his work, self-regard is the unifying element to these chapters in Arabic literature in translation. It is this perspective that accounts for the thoughtless and pervasive littering of the book with intentionalist fallacies of every scale. Kilito, in his authorial voice, is convinced of the importance of his own intentions; and so the intentions of other authors are also up for discussion and validation.
The sense that one gets of this being a book in which the author is addressing himself, writing himself, and spinning out his own internal monologue is reinforced throughout. For example, the discussion of al-Hariri's maqamat is lacking where it tries to ground itself historically. The discussion of Ibn Battuta hints at a variety of issues that might have been very interesting had they been drawn out and developed. The final two chapters, which present themselves as the heart of the matter, give the impression of being a pale imprint of the ideas being presented: they are probably very interesting, but Kilito does not deign to take us all the way through them, instead leaving us with lengths of description and the hint an argument made largely by juxtaposition. Again, the central importance of the author is reified. Surely he knows what he is talking about. Why don't we?
An evocative passage at the beginning of the final chapter ought to have been the starting point, not the ending one.
For a work that announces itself as an heir to Said's criticism ("I have learned from bitter experience that the other does not care about me unless I reached out to him" (7)), Kilito easily adopts a variety of Orientalist fallacies. Rather than giving voice to all that we have learned in the intervening century since Ernest Renan about the performance of poetry in dramatic settings and even authors we might call playwrights, such as Ibn Rushd's near-if-younger contemporary, Ibn Daniyal, Kilito instead reads completely with Renan. It is as if he recognizes what he is doing — with an explicit nod to Borges he writes: "I feel embarrassed as I write these lines, for despite myself I speak of Ibn Rushd with a certain amount of condescension. I am embarrassed because I know what he did not!" (44-5) — but despite this self-consciousness, he seems powerless to do otherwise.
And then there is the matter of the translation: The translator is irritatingly interventionist, adding a litany of footnotes defining basic terms and offering recourse to introductory readings. Some of this may have been moderated by a different typographical decision; in other words, endnotes would have been less distracting in this instance than footnotes, available to the uninitiated but unobtrusive. The overall effect is to remind the reader that this is a translated book, to remind her that it is transmitted through many hands. In reading, I wanted to shout: This is not your book! Restrain yourself! An apparatus or a bibliographic essay or a critical article should have been a separate undertaking. I suppose it serves me right: I could have read it in the original Arabic and I should have. Or, perhaps a book that adopts slices of a Derridian monolingualism, resists the idea of translation and speculates about the extent to which authors appreciated that their works might be translated should never have appeared in translation, and serves us all right for asking it to try.
More gravely, a book that largely deals with medieval Arabic translation, even in a postcolonial mode, needed to have been edited and translated by a medievalist. If the translator is overbearing in adding footnotes to explain basic concepts and introduce basic bibliography, he is also frustratingly incomplete; where he cites Roger Allen, he glaringly neglects to cite James Monroe, perhaps because he did not recognize a key idea from one of Monroe's early books which Kilito cites quite completely but (in good medieval mode) without attribution, a reference that a specialist in the field would have recognized. The makers of this book appear to have conceived of the translator's role as coterminal with that of the editor of the text and the creator of the critical apparatus, and in those duties, Wail Hassan has fallen down.
Even though it is an essayistic work of criticism, both author and translator are far too present.
Ultimately, book is a nice if unnecessary reminder of that passage from Jahiz, but otherwise is one of those texts that tragically makes its point by being the exception and the counterpoint to all of its own rules.
I'm not crazy about the work itself: The discussion of Jahiz is useful if unoriginal and uninspired. Much of the framework appears to draw heavily upon an odd couple of the author's making: Schoeler and Derrida. The book simply doesn't add any line of inquiry or analysis that is new to anyone already well-read in the history and theory of Arabic translation. Even as he reports on Jahiz's criticism of the translation of philosophy as inherently poor because the translator can never understand the idea as well as the philosopher, the voice of Kilito the narrator reads as an inexpert guide through the material though Kilito the author and critic surely is not.
From his wonder at the writings of Hrsowitha to the concept directed to uneducated European audiences for his work, self-regard is the unifying element to these chapters in Arabic literature in translation. It is this perspective that accounts for the thoughtless and pervasive littering of the book with intentionalist fallacies of every scale. Kilito, in his authorial voice, is convinced of the importance of his own intentions; and so the intentions of other authors are also up for discussion and validation.
The sense that one gets of this being a book in which the author is addressing himself, writing himself, and spinning out his own internal monologue is reinforced throughout. For example, the discussion of al-Hariri's maqamat is lacking where it tries to ground itself historically. The discussion of Ibn Battuta hints at a variety of issues that might have been very interesting had they been drawn out and developed. The final two chapters, which present themselves as the heart of the matter, give the impression of being a pale imprint of the ideas being presented: they are probably very interesting, but Kilito does not deign to take us all the way through them, instead leaving us with lengths of description and the hint an argument made largely by juxtaposition. Again, the central importance of the author is reified. Surely he knows what he is talking about. Why don't we?
An evocative passage at the beginning of the final chapter ought to have been the starting point, not the ending one.
For a work that announces itself as an heir to Said's criticism ("I have learned from bitter experience that the other does not care about me unless I reached out to him" (7)), Kilito easily adopts a variety of Orientalist fallacies. Rather than giving voice to all that we have learned in the intervening century since Ernest Renan about the performance of poetry in dramatic settings and even authors we might call playwrights, such as Ibn Rushd's near-if-younger contemporary, Ibn Daniyal, Kilito instead reads completely with Renan. It is as if he recognizes what he is doing — with an explicit nod to Borges he writes: "I feel embarrassed as I write these lines, for despite myself I speak of Ibn Rushd with a certain amount of condescension. I am embarrassed because I know what he did not!" (44-5) — but despite this self-consciousness, he seems powerless to do otherwise.
And then there is the matter of the translation: The translator is irritatingly interventionist, adding a litany of footnotes defining basic terms and offering recourse to introductory readings. Some of this may have been moderated by a different typographical decision; in other words, endnotes would have been less distracting in this instance than footnotes, available to the uninitiated but unobtrusive. The overall effect is to remind the reader that this is a translated book, to remind her that it is transmitted through many hands. In reading, I wanted to shout: This is not your book! Restrain yourself! An apparatus or a bibliographic essay or a critical article should have been a separate undertaking. I suppose it serves me right: I could have read it in the original Arabic and I should have. Or, perhaps a book that adopts slices of a Derridian monolingualism, resists the idea of translation and speculates about the extent to which authors appreciated that their works might be translated should never have appeared in translation, and serves us all right for asking it to try.
More gravely, a book that largely deals with medieval Arabic translation, even in a postcolonial mode, needed to have been edited and translated by a medievalist. If the translator is overbearing in adding footnotes to explain basic concepts and introduce basic bibliography, he is also frustratingly incomplete; where he cites Roger Allen, he glaringly neglects to cite James Monroe, perhaps because he did not recognize a key idea from one of Monroe's early books which Kilito cites quite completely but (in good medieval mode) without attribution, a reference that a specialist in the field would have recognized. The makers of this book appear to have conceived of the translator's role as coterminal with that of the editor of the text and the creator of the critical apparatus, and in those duties, Wail Hassan has fallen down.
Even though it is an essayistic work of criticism, both author and translator are far too present.
Ultimately, book is a nice if unnecessary reminder of that passage from Jahiz, but otherwise is one of those texts that tragically makes its point by being the exception and the counterpoint to all of its own rules.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
My 2013 in Books
Borrowed from The Little Professor and adapted, because I clearly don't read nearly enough detective/spy fiction despite really enjoying the genre. Hers is also better than mine because I really failed to read enough for pleasure this year. Something to aspire to in 2014. At the same time, I left out my heavy-duty academic reading because I'm too far in the thick of finishing my book manuscript for it to be fun in quite the same way. (I love my research, but...) I may update this a little bit throughout the day as there were a few other categories I was considering including. Anyway, happy reading in 2014, all!
Favorite academic novel:
The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin by Harry Karlinsky
Most disappointing petering out of a series of academic novels about German philologists:
Unusual Uses for Olive Oil by Alexander McCall Smith
Favorite academic novel:
The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin by Harry Karlinsky
Most disappointing petering out of a series of academic novels about German philologists:
Unusual Uses for Olive Oil by Alexander McCall Smith
Series that started out sublime but collapsed under the weight of its own metaphors:
The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis
Historical novel set in medieval Spain that could potentially be so bad that it's been sitting on my nightstand since I bought it but haven't quite been able to bring myself to crack the cover:
The Guide of the Perplexed by Dara Horn
The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis
Historical novel set in medieval Spain that could potentially be so bad that it's been sitting on my nightstand since I bought it but haven't quite been able to bring myself to crack the cover:
The Guide of the Perplexed by Dara Horn
Historical novels set in/reflecting on medieval Spain that I'm excited to swap into this round of my "Al-Andalus in Modern Fiction" course:
The Conquest of Andalusia by Jurji Zaydan; Days of Awe by Achy Obejas.
The Conquest of Andalusia by Jurji Zaydan; Days of Awe by Achy Obejas.
Historical novel set in medieval Spain that is sufficiently problematic that I've swapped it out of this round of my "Al-Andalus in Modern Fiction" course:
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Favorite novels by Arab authors:
ḤWJN by Ibrahim Abbas, Arabic, banned in Saudi Arabia; Guf sheni yaḥid (Second-Person Singular), Sayed Kashua, Hebrew.
Favorite graphic novel:
The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil by Stephen Collins
(Also favorite book lugged back from the United Kingdom in my suitcase. Also-also favorite book about a giant beard that was evil.)
Graphic novel that most horrifyingly appropriates medieval characters to serve modern religio-political purposes that would have been antithetical to them:
Rabbeinu Shmuel Hanagid by Aryeh Mahr and Esteve Polls
Graphic novel with a surprisingly wonderful, nuanced presentation of religious history:
The Rabbi’s Cat, vols. 1-2, by Johann Sfar
Graphic novels I found on the give-away/book-swap table in the basement of my apartment building:
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel; Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan; The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey (There was one other, but it just ended up kicking around my apartment so I put it back and it was clearly so memorable that I've forgotten what it was...)
Best use of the ‘I found a manuscript!’ framing device:
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
(Also best reworking of Shakespeare. Also-also book I started reading almost fully two years ago when it first came out, misplaced my copy, and only just finished it now.)
Worst use of the ‘I found a manuscript!’ framing device:
A Manuscript Found in Accra by Paulo Cohello
Because somehow removing all references to detective fiction seemed wrong, given the original contents of the original list/Literary pop culture mass delusion in which I willingly participated:
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, aka J.K. Rowling
Books I read this year about museums I visited this year/Real-life obsessional private-eye tale/Best art crime book/Needed to include more detectives on this list:
The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Bossier
Books about famous books I've seen in museum exhibitions:
Thomas Jefferson's Qur'ān by Denise Spellberg
Books about books (general category):
In Praise of Copying by Marcus Boon; Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby; Fragments and Assemblages by Arthur Bahr; Textual Situations by Andrew Taylor.
History of Jews in random and unexpected places:
When General Grant Expelled the Jews by Jonathan Sarna; The Mauritian Shekel by Genevieve Pitot (nobody who knows me in real life is allowed to give me a hard time about having read this).
History of Muslims in random and unexpected places:
Prince Among Slaves by Terry Alford
Books currently in my bathroom that normal people don't keep in their bathrooms:
Maimonides: Life and Thought by Moshe Halbertal; Meditaciones del Quijote by José Ortega y Gasset
Academic book a student couldn't read because the title was so ridiculous:
Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. Or so the student informed me.
Worst prose in any novel assigned for class:
The English translation of López de Gómara's General History of the West Indies. So impenetrable that I took mercy on my freshmen and told them to skip it.
Best novel reread for a course:
Don Quijote
I have not managed to stop this trend:
Argh! When I first read LP's list, I thought of something spot-on for this category, but it has since left my brain. I'm sure I'll think of it. Round about February. Clearly I have also not managed to stop the trend of me completely losing my mind.
Book I read in the theory-freakout fugue aftermath of the chair of my department telling me: “You're doing very theoretically sophisticated work, but you blanch any time anyone says the word ‘theory’ to you”:
The Monolingualism of the Other by Jacques Derrida
Works of theory that are more my speed that I read once stopped freaking out about theory: How to Do Things with Fictions by Joshusa Landy; On Literary Worlds by Eric Hayot; Against World Literature by Emily Apter; Dark Tongues by Daniel Heller-Roazan
Books I'm reading as I try to come up with a better answer for when people ask me what my academic discipline is:
The Logics of History by William Sewell, Jr.; Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts by Sam Wineburg. (See also: previous category.)
Groupings of books I'd like to write review essays of as blog posts, but haven't gotten my act together:
Grouping 1: Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War by Alexander Nemerov; Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina by Gordon Campbell, et al.; A Most Dangerous Book by Christopher Krebs; and the much-maligned The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.
Grouping 2: The Forgetting River by Doreen Carvajal; Al-Andalus Rediscovered by Marvine Howe; Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History by Aaron Hughes; and Inheriting Abraham by Jon Levenson.
Best massive discounts from Amazon:
Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship; A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations
Most antiquarian acquisition:
Facsimile edition of the Sarajevo Haggadah
Out-of-print books acquired through ABE:
War Reporter by Dan O'Brien; The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit by Sylvia Plath
Book I was most relieved to remember that I own after I forgot I owned it, looked it up in the NYU library catalogue, and realized it was going to be seriously difficult to get my hands on a library copy by the time I needed to have read it:
Rethinking Medieval Translation, eds. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills
Largest single acquisition:
I inherited a large chunk of a former professor's library. Currently in boxes in my front hall. In addition to reading more for pleasure, my big book goal for 2014 is going to be to catalogue those and figure out where to shelve them.
Final book-listing task for 2013:
The bibliography for an article that's due tomorrow and will be submitted tomorrow, come Hell or high explosives.
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Favorite novels by Arab authors:
ḤWJN by Ibrahim Abbas, Arabic, banned in Saudi Arabia; Guf sheni yaḥid (Second-Person Singular), Sayed Kashua, Hebrew.
Favorite graphic novel:
The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil by Stephen Collins
(Also favorite book lugged back from the United Kingdom in my suitcase. Also-also favorite book about a giant beard that was evil.)
Graphic novel that most horrifyingly appropriates medieval characters to serve modern religio-political purposes that would have been antithetical to them:
Rabbeinu Shmuel Hanagid by Aryeh Mahr and Esteve Polls
Graphic novel with a surprisingly wonderful, nuanced presentation of religious history:
The Rabbi’s Cat, vols. 1-2, by Johann Sfar
Graphic novels I found on the give-away/book-swap table in the basement of my apartment building:
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel; Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan; The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey (There was one other, but it just ended up kicking around my apartment so I put it back and it was clearly so memorable that I've forgotten what it was...)
Best use of the ‘I found a manuscript!’ framing device:
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
(Also best reworking of Shakespeare. Also-also book I started reading almost fully two years ago when it first came out, misplaced my copy, and only just finished it now.)
Worst use of the ‘I found a manuscript!’ framing device:
A Manuscript Found in Accra by Paulo Cohello
Because somehow removing all references to detective fiction seemed wrong, given the original contents of the original list/Literary pop culture mass delusion in which I willingly participated:
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, aka J.K. Rowling
Books I read this year about museums I visited this year/Real-life obsessional private-eye tale/Best art crime book/Needed to include more detectives on this list:
The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Bossier
Books about famous books I've seen in museum exhibitions:
Thomas Jefferson's Qur'ān by Denise Spellberg
Books about books (general category):
In Praise of Copying by Marcus Boon; Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby; Fragments and Assemblages by Arthur Bahr; Textual Situations by Andrew Taylor.
History of Jews in random and unexpected places:
When General Grant Expelled the Jews by Jonathan Sarna; The Mauritian Shekel by Genevieve Pitot (nobody who knows me in real life is allowed to give me a hard time about having read this).
History of Muslims in random and unexpected places:
Prince Among Slaves by Terry Alford
Books currently in my bathroom that normal people don't keep in their bathrooms:
Maimonides: Life and Thought by Moshe Halbertal; Meditaciones del Quijote by José Ortega y Gasset
Academic book a student couldn't read because the title was so ridiculous:
Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. Or so the student informed me.
Worst prose in any novel assigned for class:
The English translation of López de Gómara's General History of the West Indies. So impenetrable that I took mercy on my freshmen and told them to skip it.
Best novel reread for a course:
Don Quijote
I have not managed to stop this trend:
Argh! When I first read LP's list, I thought of something spot-on for this category, but it has since left my brain. I'm sure I'll think of it. Round about February. Clearly I have also not managed to stop the trend of me completely losing my mind.
Book I read in the theory-freakout fugue aftermath of the chair of my department telling me: “You're doing very theoretically sophisticated work, but you blanch any time anyone says the word ‘theory’ to you”:
The Monolingualism of the Other by Jacques Derrida
Works of theory that are more my speed that I read once stopped freaking out about theory: How to Do Things with Fictions by Joshusa Landy; On Literary Worlds by Eric Hayot; Against World Literature by Emily Apter; Dark Tongues by Daniel Heller-Roazan
Books I'm reading as I try to come up with a better answer for when people ask me what my academic discipline is:
The Logics of History by William Sewell, Jr.; Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts by Sam Wineburg. (See also: previous category.)
Groupings of books I'd like to write review essays of as blog posts, but haven't gotten my act together:
Grouping 1: Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War by Alexander Nemerov; Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina by Gordon Campbell, et al.; A Most Dangerous Book by Christopher Krebs; and the much-maligned The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.
Grouping 2: The Forgetting River by Doreen Carvajal; Al-Andalus Rediscovered by Marvine Howe; Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History by Aaron Hughes; and Inheriting Abraham by Jon Levenson.
Best massive discounts from Amazon:
Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship; A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations
Most antiquarian acquisition:
Facsimile edition of the Sarajevo Haggadah
Out-of-print books acquired through ABE:
War Reporter by Dan O'Brien; The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit by Sylvia Plath
Book I was most relieved to remember that I own after I forgot I owned it, looked it up in the NYU library catalogue, and realized it was going to be seriously difficult to get my hands on a library copy by the time I needed to have read it:
Rethinking Medieval Translation, eds. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills
Largest single acquisition:
I inherited a large chunk of a former professor's library. Currently in boxes in my front hall. In addition to reading more for pleasure, my big book goal for 2014 is going to be to catalogue those and figure out where to shelve them.
Final book-listing task for 2013:
The bibliography for an article that's due tomorrow and will be submitted tomorrow, come Hell or high explosives.
Friday, July 19, 2013
A Good Bribe Gone Bad
I have two book reviews that are, at this point, seriously late. They may only be a little late by the standards of book review editors, who often have two-year-long queues of review backlog and appear not to really care when new reviews come in, but for my own comfort with deadlines and my desire to get things crossed off my to-do list, they are seriously late and need to get finished. By me.
So I brought both books to England with me with the promise that if I finished the reviews, I would allow myself the indulgence of mailing the books home rather than schlepping them along in my suitcase to Israel. It seemed a little like overkill but a bribe has to involve a real and desirable reward; and the promise of not having to lug two not insubstantial books — one a hardbound single-author monograph of typical length and the other softbound but a museum exhibition catalogue printed on luxuriously heavy paper — around with me seemed like a good one.
The only trouble is that it didn't work. In addition to my work in the libraries I came to visit, I have, with the exception of a few references that need checking when I get home, basically completed the last chapter of the book manuscript and written 1500 words of a 10k-word chapter for an edited collection that isn't due to the editors until February.
There's nothing like having less desirable tasks at hand to increase productivity. I guess I'll have to find some really unpleasant task to undertake that will make writing book reviews seem like the only thing worth doing.
Anybody have some stables that need mucking?
So I brought both books to England with me with the promise that if I finished the reviews, I would allow myself the indulgence of mailing the books home rather than schlepping them along in my suitcase to Israel. It seemed a little like overkill but a bribe has to involve a real and desirable reward; and the promise of not having to lug two not insubstantial books — one a hardbound single-author monograph of typical length and the other softbound but a museum exhibition catalogue printed on luxuriously heavy paper — around with me seemed like a good one.
The only trouble is that it didn't work. In addition to my work in the libraries I came to visit, I have, with the exception of a few references that need checking when I get home, basically completed the last chapter of the book manuscript and written 1500 words of a 10k-word chapter for an edited collection that isn't due to the editors until February.
There's nothing like having less desirable tasks at hand to increase productivity. I guess I'll have to find some really unpleasant task to undertake that will make writing book reviews seem like the only thing worth doing.
Anybody have some stables that need mucking?
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Book Review: The Lifespan of a Fact
The new book The Lifespan of a Fact is a glossed reprint of an essay written by John D'Agata. The glosses are the transcript of correspondence between the author, the man assigned to fact-check the essay, and their editor. They record a debate over the value of facts, the nature of precision, and the values upheld by non-fiction writing.
I approached the book expecting to very sympathetic to the author against the fact-checker, because there are occasional moments in my own writing where I find that if a fact were only slightly different, the whole thing would sound a lot better or the narrative would be a bit better crafted. But I found myself surprised by the extent of what D'Agata thought was necessary: Is the all-time record of 118 degrees really that much more dramatic than the real temperature on the day in question, the record for that year of 113? Did the month's worth of factoids that he collapsed into the single day of the suicide that was the subject of his essay really pack that much more of a punch having happened on the day of his death than in the month in which he died?
It did leave me wondering how many of the discrepancies were written into the text because D'Agata simply has a superior ear and I can't appreciate the difference, and how many of them were left because he has become a diva and is no longer obligated to play by even some semblance of the rules; and I'm pretty confident in my ear. Like I said, I started out reading totally sympathetic to his position, having argued over questions of style with many an editor and occasionally having wished fervently that small details (both in academic and essayistic writing) could have been just a little bit different, but the extreme to which it seems to be carried out is, well, extreme.
As a book, The Lifespan of a Fact is a fascinating exercise and a beautiful example of a modern glossed text. But it left me more interested in the facts than the lifespan. I came away with exactly the opposite conclusion of the one I had expected and hoped to draw. I think I failed to take the larger point of the glosses to heart; but it's a compelling voice that Fingal has that was able to convert an inveterate storyteller to the side of fact.
I approached the book expecting to very sympathetic to the author against the fact-checker, because there are occasional moments in my own writing where I find that if a fact were only slightly different, the whole thing would sound a lot better or the narrative would be a bit better crafted. But I found myself surprised by the extent of what D'Agata thought was necessary: Is the all-time record of 118 degrees really that much more dramatic than the real temperature on the day in question, the record for that year of 113? Did the month's worth of factoids that he collapsed into the single day of the suicide that was the subject of his essay really pack that much more of a punch having happened on the day of his death than in the month in which he died?
It did leave me wondering how many of the discrepancies were written into the text because D'Agata simply has a superior ear and I can't appreciate the difference, and how many of them were left because he has become a diva and is no longer obligated to play by even some semblance of the rules; and I'm pretty confident in my ear. Like I said, I started out reading totally sympathetic to his position, having argued over questions of style with many an editor and occasionally having wished fervently that small details (both in academic and essayistic writing) could have been just a little bit different, but the extreme to which it seems to be carried out is, well, extreme.
As a book, The Lifespan of a Fact is a fascinating exercise and a beautiful example of a modern glossed text. But it left me more interested in the facts than the lifespan. I came away with exactly the opposite conclusion of the one I had expected and hoped to draw. I think I failed to take the larger point of the glosses to heart; but it's a compelling voice that Fingal has that was able to convert an inveterate storyteller to the side of fact.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Book Review: Habibi by Craig Thompson
I was brought a copy of Craig Thompson's graphic novel, Habibi, by a dear graduate school friend of mine. (If you're at all interested in archaeology, technology, sci-fi and fantasy or comics and graphic novels, she's a prolific and really interesting tweeter to follow @girlarchaeo.) I had seen the book and had been hoping to read it, but had apparently missed out on the (perhaps predictable) critical storm surrounding it. She filled me in and said she'd be curious what I'd think about it as both an Arabist and a habitual reader of graphic novels. So here goes:
The short answer is that as a slightly misanthropic Arabist, I love the way in which the book honors and beautifies the language and the script.
I know that it speaks much to my failings as a lay reader — that is, when I've taken my critic hat off and am simply reading for the pure hedonism of it — and to the one-dimensionality I sometimes inadvertently permit myself that I find the musings about writing to be so tactilely pleasurable that I'm not sure I care about the sexualization of the female character or the orientalization of the made-up kingdom; but that sort of reaction is also the fault (whether you want to understand that as a good or bad thing) of the author/artist. In a way the objectification of the female protagonist within the story is merely an allegory for her objectification in or reduction against the notion of book-as-thing or book-as-art. If the written word is the ultimate art form, then why do we need the three-dimensional beauty of the human form? Look at what man has wrought. Hubris, perhaps, but still... it's there on the page.
Where a certain brand of orientalism does bother me, it is in the idea of a writer copying out words he does not understand: Several published interviews have reported that Thompson learned the Arabic script but nothing else. It is not a problem without historical precedent, though: In the course of my academic work, I have read accounts of eighteenth-century debates at the Spanish Royal Academy of History over whether the inscriptional heritage of the country would be better documented by someone who did or someone who did not read Hebrew or Arabic; they debated whether someone who didn't know what he was looking at would render the inscriptions more faithfully than someone who could read and might then represent what he thought he was recognizing. It also dovetails really beautifully with questions about why Arabic calligraphic decoration is placed so high up in building as to render it illegible, or why it is sometimes rendered as simple squiggles, even for an Arabic-literate population.
The Guardian recently published images from Thompson's sketchbook:
In a way, these drawings are as evocative to me as a student of Arabic as one of my dissertation texts, in which a Hebrew translator marvels at the strange rules of Arabic grammar. ("Sometimes when we would use the plural, they use the singular feminine," my translator half-marvels and half-complains.) There is a strong kinship among all of us who have struggled to learn the language — and this one is always a struggle. But at the same time, these words are all art for Thompson. He draws Arabic rather than writing it. The book becomes, at once, a glorification of literacy and a total strike against it.
The short answer is that as a slightly misanthropic Arabist, I love the way in which the book honors and beautifies the language and the script.
I know that it speaks much to my failings as a lay reader — that is, when I've taken my critic hat off and am simply reading for the pure hedonism of it — and to the one-dimensionality I sometimes inadvertently permit myself that I find the musings about writing to be so tactilely pleasurable that I'm not sure I care about the sexualization of the female character or the orientalization of the made-up kingdom; but that sort of reaction is also the fault (whether you want to understand that as a good or bad thing) of the author/artist. In a way the objectification of the female protagonist within the story is merely an allegory for her objectification in or reduction against the notion of book-as-thing or book-as-art. If the written word is the ultimate art form, then why do we need the three-dimensional beauty of the human form? Look at what man has wrought. Hubris, perhaps, but still... it's there on the page.
Where a certain brand of orientalism does bother me, it is in the idea of a writer copying out words he does not understand: Several published interviews have reported that Thompson learned the Arabic script but nothing else. It is not a problem without historical precedent, though: In the course of my academic work, I have read accounts of eighteenth-century debates at the Spanish Royal Academy of History over whether the inscriptional heritage of the country would be better documented by someone who did or someone who did not read Hebrew or Arabic; they debated whether someone who didn't know what he was looking at would render the inscriptions more faithfully than someone who could read and might then represent what he thought he was recognizing. It also dovetails really beautifully with questions about why Arabic calligraphic decoration is placed so high up in building as to render it illegible, or why it is sometimes rendered as simple squiggles, even for an Arabic-literate population.
The Guardian recently published images from Thompson's sketchbook:
(Click to enlarge; follow the link above for more.)
In a way, these drawings are as evocative to me as a student of Arabic as one of my dissertation texts, in which a Hebrew translator marvels at the strange rules of Arabic grammar. ("Sometimes when we would use the plural, they use the singular feminine," my translator half-marvels and half-complains.) There is a strong kinship among all of us who have struggled to learn the language — and this one is always a struggle. But at the same time, these words are all art for Thompson. He draws Arabic rather than writing it. The book becomes, at once, a glorification of literacy and a total strike against it.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Book Review: The Most Magnificent Mosque
I am frequently jealous of my friends and colleagues who work on the ancient world because there are so many lovely children's books with beautiful illustrations. It's not that anybody really needs children's books about his or her field of study, but they sometimes contain illustrations that can be useful in introductory or general-audience lectures; and selfishly, one likes to think that so fascinating a topic, whatever it might be, has appeal to people beyond the ivory tower. So, I was very excited to discover the existence of The Most Magnificent Mosque written by Ann Tungman, a University of Exeter-trained lawyer-turned-teacher and illustrated by Shelley Fowles, a graphic designer based in Brighton. It was published in 2004 by Frances Lincoln Children's Books.The book tells the story of three boys, one Jewish, one Christian and one Muslim, who are troublemakers in the city of Córdoba until one day they get caught dropping oranges on the head of the caliph and are sentenced to several months' of work in the gardens of the mosque. In order to take a break from the scorching summer sun, they often seek refuge inside the Great Mosque and come to appreciate its splendor. When they are grown, they reunite to keep Fernando III, who conquered the city in 1236, from razing the mosque.
The book's underpinnings are a curious mix of both the well-intentioned and the quite malicious stereotypes that plague this field of study at the professional level; it's almost as if the author read a few of the most inflammatory press clippings and book reviews, cottoned onto them and deemed her research to be sufficient. At once a Muslim boy can be best of friends with a Christian boy and a Jewish boy, but then the evil Christian reconquerers sweep into Cordoba and want to sunder everything that the Muslim rules and the rank-and-file multiconfessional population had achieved. The words put into the mouth of the fictionalized Fernando III, who reconsecrated and preserved the Great Mosque as it was (aside from adding two small chapels) are: "'It is indeed a magnificent mosque,' said the king, and he sighed. 'But this is to be a Christian city and we shall build a great cathedral on this site. The mosque must be pulled down." It's sad that the author took a figure who was, indeed, a champion of multiconfessionalism and turned him into a villain. The real lesson of the Great Mosque (at this level, anyway) is that a cathedral can look like the local architectural style dictates a sacred space should. Cathedral does not automatically imply high gothic. This book teaches children that a building with arches and calligraphic decoration cannot be a church, which is untrue and even contravenes the message of tolerance and integration that the book seems, on the surface, to want to promote.
I don't mean to say that children's story books need be perfect histories, but there should be some truth to ground their aspirations to a better world. In other words, this book would not have had to be strictly accurate to be worthwhile, but it should have been true in some way. And furthermore, I do think that the conflation of one named historical figure with a version of the actions of another, with absolutely no indication of what is happening is a problem. In actual fact it was Charles V who plunked a renaissance-style cathedral in the middle of the original mosque complex; he was the one the rank and file in Córdoba opposed, and he is said to have regretted his decision almost immediately after it was completed. And there is no narrative reason why Ferdinand III should have been made the villain of this story.
I did laugh aloud when I read the page on which the boys, who enjoy making mischief in their hometown of Córdoba, are finally caught after they dropped an orange on the caliph's head from their perch atop the minaret. I'm not sure that was the desired effect, though.
The representations of the characters' outfits is also a bit strange. The children are dressed in such a way that one cannot but wonder if there is a comment implicit in the illustrations about sumptuary laws. All the Christians wear cross necklaces, which forces one to ask why their presence need be signaled in such a way. Is the book trying to say that people respected each other's religious traditions while holding their own dear? Or is it that society was so assimilated that this was the only way to tell people apart? That religion was really the most important thing? Additionally, the outfit that the caliph is drawn in looks curiously similar to papal vestments.
One other seemingly tiny problem betrays the book's ill-informed and uncareful approach to the whole matter: While the author managed to describe Rashid, one of the boys, as a "Muslim" in the text of the book, he suddenly becomes a "Moslem" on the back cover and a "Moor" in the front matter.
With all that said, though, on balance I'm still marginally pleased by the book's existence.
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