July 27, 2003

CANADIAN novelist Carol Shields died of breast cancer. She was 68. Shields wrote poetry, criticism and biography, but focused on the novel when her first novel, Small Ceremonies, was published in 1976. She went onto write 10 more novels and was working on her eleventh when she died. Her last book, Unless, (reviewed in Books & Authors of July 13, 2003) was an international success, nominated for many literary prizes, including the Booker, and the Orange. She won the Orange award in 1998 for her novel Larry’s Party. She also wrote The Stone Diaries, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 1995, and won her the Pulitzer Prize. In May she was the only living author voted on a list of the 10 greatest novels by women.

Sheilds was born in Chicago and claimed to have started writing because she could not find any novels about clever, interesting, and politically conscious women who also loved their homes and their families. Women in fiction, she felt, were either “bimbos or bitches”.

She was married for 46 years and had four daughters and a son. She died in Victoria, British Columbia.

 

Musharraf accuses French author

PAUL Michaud reports from Paris that upon his arrival at a press conference in Paris earlier this month, President Pervez Musharraf reserved his comments on French author Bernard-Henry Levy, whose work Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (reviewed in Books & Authors of June 15, 2003) has become a runaway bestseller there. Unusual for a non-American book, the work was advertised with full-page ads in the daily French press, proclaiming the “unanimous praise” it was accorded in France.

When queried by a Pakistani journalist, General Musharraf, said “his book is not worth replying to,” before adding that “I’d like to ask him under whose influence he wrote his book, for what vested interest he undertook to represent Pakistan in such a negative fashion.”

Levy alleges that Pearl, a Paris-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, was murdered by the ISI, and that Pakistan’s secret service “no longer answered to Musharraf or the Pakistani government” and had become a power unto itself. To this Musharraf replied that a nation’s intelligence services do what the government wants them to do and not vice versa.

 

Jeffrey Archer released

AFTER more than two years behind bars, disgraced peer and author Jeffrey Archer was released from Hollesley Bay Open prison near Suffolk on July 21. He was serving a four-year sentence for perjury and perverting the course of justice in a libel case involving a prostitute. Upon his release he made his first visit to his probation officer followed by dozens of journalists, cameramen, photographers and onlookers. He refused to answer any questions.

A statement issued by Lord Archer confirmed that he would be making a speech to the Howard League for Penal Reform in September. The statement said: “I want to thank my wife Mary and my sons, William and James, for their unwavering and unstinting support during this unhappy period in my life.

“I should also like to thank the many friends who took the trouble to visit me in prison, as well as countless members of the public who sent letters, cards and gifts.

“I shall not be giving any interviews for the foreseeable future.”

 

Harry Potter piracy

HARRY Potter mania has come to our shores and local pirates smell money. Pirated versions of the latest Harry Potter book have appeared on the market in Pakistan and they are outselling J.K. Rowling’s official version. The fifth installment of Harry Potter smashed world records after it was released on June 21.

One local bookseller said that at least five different versions of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix were available on the market. Priced at between 195-495 rupees, the books are an attractive alternative to the real thing, that is priced at a steep $29.99.

The bookseller revealed that he initially planned to import 15,000 to 16,000 copies but because of rampant piracy had reduced the order to a mere 1000 copies.

Harry Potter has fought piracy in countries such as Germany and China in the past. Publishers, Bloomsbury, were not available for comment.

 

African writing prize

KENYAN author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor has won the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Weight of whispers”. In an interview, Owuor said she felt “excited” and “stunned”, adding that she had an obligation to encourage other people in Africa to write.

The prize worth $15,000 is considered one of the most prestigious awards for African literature and is given for a short story written in English by an African author.

Her short story is written in the voice of an aristocratic Rwandan refugee in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide.

The result was announced by the judges in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, in the UK. This is the second year in a row that the award has been won by a Kenyan. Owuor was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and has a BA in Linguistics in English & History. She attended the University of Reading in the UK, where she studied for an MA in TV/Video Development. She has written a screenplay for the Africa Script Development Fund (Harare) and is currently Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival.

The Caine Prize was started by the late businessman Sir Michael Caine who ran the Booker prize for many years.

 

24 years later

TWENTY-four years after his death, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse will be buried in a Berlin cemetery next to the grave of his intellectual forefather Hegel. A Berliner who became an American citizen, Marcuse died of a stroke in 1979 during a visit to what was then West Berlin. Marcuse was one of the most influential intellectuals of his generation and an inspiration for the 1960s student movements.

He had been cremated in Austria and his ashes were sent back to the United States. His urn was in New Haven, Connecticut for the last two decades before being “rediscovered” by his descendants in 2001.

It was decided that his remains should be returned to his birthplace, where the city government agreed to give him an honorary gravesite between those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and fellow philosopher Johann Gottlieb Friedrich Hegel.

Marcuse was one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in the western city of Frankfurt. He became a US citizen in the 1950s and an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war.

 

Oprah outshines Hillary

WHEN it comes to books no one can match Oprah, not even Hillary Clinton. While the former first lady’s confessions and intimate memoirs of her years at the White House was hailed a publishing sensation, Oprah only had to revive her imensely popular book club to send John Steinbeck’s East of Eden ahead to No.2 on Amazon.com bestseller list, just behind Harry Potter’s latest.

Penguin now has 1.2m copies of East of Eden in print. Steinbeck’s book is a symbolic recreation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel woven into a history of California’s Salinas Valley. Winfrey said it was Steinbeck’s work that had prompted her to revive the club.

 

Hepburn biography

A BOOK about Katharine Hepburn has been released less than two weeks after the legendary actress died. The author terms the work “part biography and part memoir”. Kate Remembered has been written by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg who befriended the actress in 1983.

“For more than 20 years, Katharine Hepburn imparted many of the details of her life to me, suggesting that I weave them into a book - one that would appear upon her death,” Berg said. He said Hepburn wanted the book published soon after her death to correct any inaccuracies about her life printed in other publications.

“With this book, I think, she imagined there would be at least a foundation of truth — of what she actually said and thought about things, in many cases things she felt should not be printed until she died,” he said.

The book contains details about Hepburn’s career and her relationships with Spencer Tracy and Howard Hughes. Hepburn died on June 29 at the age of 96. In 1991, her memoir Me: Stories of My Life, was published. She also wrote, The Making of the African Queen: Or, How I Went To Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind.

Berg wrote Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, for which he won the National Book Award; Goldwyn: A Biography; and Lindbergh, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

 

Pakistan’s Islamists target classics

AN item from the Guardian doing the rounds on the Internet says that a review of books studied in the English courses at Lahore’s Punjab University picked out several texts, which contained offensive sexual connotations and thus were deemed vulgar. The texts included parts of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

The review seems to have been triggered by complaints made by the wife of a retired army general. She criticized two poems, one by W.H. Auden, which she said promoted Jews, and a poem by Vikram Seth, who she said was too pro-Indian. “We have been tolerant for too long,” the general’s wife said in a meeting with academics from the department.

She reportedly passed her criticism on to Sehba Musharraf, the wife of the president. Next it was heard that on the president’s orders the military officers who run the university have taken up the case.

The books on the English literature undergraduate and masters syllabus were reviewed by Shahbaz Arif, a lecturer in English, who proposed to rule out dozens of texts studied around the world. He said the books he had singled out used “vulgar words” and left students, who came from conservative backgrounds and had poor spoken English, “shy” and “embarrassed”.

In an internal memo, Dr Arif highlighted Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises saying that “All characters are sexually astray: men homosexuals; females lesbians/promiscuous; Brett Ashley nymphomaniac and so on.” The list includes The Rape of the Lock, about which his comments are “The title of the book itself shows vulgarity.” Other books were criticized for scenes involving alcohol.

Dr Arif’s proposals will go before the next meeting of the university’s board of studies, which has the final say on the syllabus.

Masood-ul-Haq, a retired army colonel and the university’s registrar, said no books on the syllabus would change and that the row was a “tussle” between some members of the English department.

 

Great Bengali poet dies

ONE of the greatest poets of Bengali, Subhas Mukhopadhyay, has died in Kolkata. He was 84. Born in West Bengal, Mukhopadhyay gained fame for his indictments of social ills and political corruption following India’s independence. His work has been translated into English and Russian, and he won the two highest literary awards in India the Sahitya Academy award in 1964, and the Gyanpith in 1991.

A left-wing activist in his youth, he wrote mostly about the life of the industrial labourer and the peasant. He was also a great advocate of the indivisibility of the Bengali language and culture. His famous poetry collections include Padatik (Foot Soldier), E Bhai (Oh Brother), Kal Madhumash (Tomorrow Month of Honey) and Chole Geche Bone (Gone to Woods). Mukhopadhyay is survived by his wife, the writer Gita Bandopadhyay, and three adopted daughters.

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