Our October Author: Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist has his own website which handily compiles links to interviews. (You can't go wrong with NPR's Terry Gross. Random tidbits from a few others I explored follow below.) There is also a list of articles he has written, many about Pakistani politics, and a link to an "interactive" short story if you are feeling adventurous, on his site.

The author suggests future titles for Rights Readers:



I am sure he scores points with our Esteemed but Busy Readers for picking short books!

Man Booker Prize interview (wherein we also learn that Mira Nair has the film rights for the book),

There has been speculation about the meaning behind the name of your protagonist ‘Changez’. Can you clarify any meaning behind his name?

Changez is the Urdu name for Genghis, as in Genghis Khan. It is the name of a warrior, and the novel plays with the notion of a parallel between war and international finance, which is Changez’s occupation. But at the same time, the name cautions against a particular reading of the novel. Genghis attacked the Arab Muslim civilization of his time, so Changez would be an odd choice of name for a Muslim fundamentalist. In fact, Changez is something of a secular nationalist, and not particularly religious.

Harcourt,

Q: Personal and public mourning run side by side in this story of raw emotions. Changez loses his footing when he is unable to separate the two. Was it difficult to find balance as you simultaneously probed the intimate pains and passions of one man’s loss and explored an entire nation’s tragedy?

A: I believe that the personal and the political are deeply intertwined; in my own life I certainly experience them as such. I don’t set out to find a balance between the two in my novels. Instead, I try to explore the places where they intersect most powerfully. People and countries tend to blur in my fiction; both serve as symbols of the other. Which is not to say that my characters are chess pieces: I see my characters as fully human, not as mere motifs. The countries in my fiction are far from monolithic and are capable of envy, passion, and nostalgia; they are, in other words, quite like people, and I try to explore them with that sensibility.

Critical Mass, One and Two

Q: When I finished it, I felt like I had read a much longer book than I had –

A: Well it is longer; there are many ghosts in the novel in the sense that there's upwards of 1,000 pages of different manuscript lying around. There are things that Erica did and these characters did and stuff they have done and been which aren't in the book. But having written them once you can dispense with them, and then you can touch things which imply that they happened. It gives a book that iceberg quality.

For January: Finding Freedom by Jarvis Jay Masters

For January, we have chosen Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row by California death row inmate Jarvis Jay Masters:

Finding Freedom is a collection of prison stories - sometimes shocking, sometimes sad, often funny, always immediate-told against a background of extreme violence and aggression, written by a prisoner on death row who has become a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism.

Eritrea: Yet Another Sad Anniversary

Today is the seventh anniversary of the arrest of Estifanos Seyoum, the Eritrean prisoner of conscience adopted by AI Group 22. He was detained in 2001 along with 10 other senior officials and 11 journalists in a general crackdown by the Eritrea government. None of these prisoners has ever been charged or tried. Some are reported to have died in prison but Eritrea refuses to reveal anything about them. Amnesty International issued the following statement to mark this sad occasion:

AI Index: AFR 64/007/2008 (Public)
Date: 18 September 2008

Eritrea: Prisoners of conscience remembered on 7th anniversary of mass detentions

Seven years ago, on 18 September 2001, the Government of Eritrea detained hundreds of former government leaders, private-media journalists and civil servants. Today, as we mark the seventh anniversary of this detention, most are still believed to be held in incommunicado detention.

Amnesty International considers these detainees to be prisoners of conscience, detained for the peaceful expression of their political views. The Eritrean government has never disclosed the location of those detained, and has repeatedly failed to provide a verifiable response to allegations that a number of those detained have died in detention, in spite of persistent appeals from Amnesty International members worldwide.

The Government of Eritrea is doing all that they can to ensure that these prisoners are forgotten. They are still denied family visits. No-one has been charged or brought to court. They are also believed to be denied medical treatment and are in many cases are likely to be detained in harsh conditions and subjected to torture, or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment.
[more]

Our September Author: Louisa Waugh

I wasn't able to find any interviews with our September author, Louisa Waugh (Selling Olga: Stories of Human Trafficking, Hearing Birds Fly), however, to round out her resume, there are a couple of articles from the Guardian about new Bosnian fiction and women travel writers, plus and and blog entries from Gaza for the New Internationalist.

For a little more on the issue of trafficking, the NYT has a good "issues page" to help you get started and I recommend this NPR Talk of the Nation discussion and related New Yorker article on countertrafficking.

Of course, don't forget to check out Amnesty's abundant resources on the topic including FAQ , background info , other organizations and last but not least actions!

For December: The Successor by Ismail Kadare

For December, we have selected The Successor by Ismail Kadare:

A powerful political novel based on the sudden, mysterious death of the man who had been handpicked to succeed the hated Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? That is the burning question. The man who died by his own hand, or another's, was Mehmet Shehu, the presumed heir to the ailing dictator, Enver Hoxha. So sure was the world that he was next in line, he was known as The Successor. And then, shortly before he was to assume power, he was found dead. THE SUCCESSOR is simultaneously a mystery novel, an historical novel-based on actual events and buttressed by the author's private conversations with the son of the real-life Mehmet Shehu-and a psychological novel (How do you live when nothing is sure?). Vintage Kadare, THE SUCCESSOR seamlessly blends dream and reality, legendary past, and contemporary history.

For November: The Art of Political Murder

For November, we have selected Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop

Bishop Juan Gerardi, Guatemala’s leading human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death in his garage on a Sunday night in 1998, two days after the presentation of a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some two hundred thousand civilians. Realizing that it could not rely on police investigators or the legal system to solve the murder, the church formed its own investigative team, a group of secular young men in their twenties who called themselves Los Intocables (the Untouchables). Known in Guatemala as “The Crime of the Century,” the Bishop Gerardi murder case, with its unexpectedly outlandish scenarios and sensational developments, confounded observers and generated extraordinary controversy. In his first nonfiction book, acclaimed novelist Francisco Goldman has spoken to witnesses no other reporter has reached, and observed firsthand some of the most crucial developments in the case. Now he has produced The Art of Political Murder, a tense and astonishing true detective story that opens a window on the new Latin American reality of mara youth gangs and organized crime, and tells the story of a remarkable group of engaging, courageous young people, and of their remarkable fight for justice.

Our August Author

A few links for our August author, Jo Nesbø, and our August selection, The Redbreast.

Random House has a reader's guide with a short interview,

What could get you arrested?

You mean; what got me arrested? Well, dropping my pants and mooning for a passing police car when I was eighteen. A bit drunk and nothing I'm very proud of, but it gave me the chance to do some research. I know what the inside of a cell looks like.

And here's a Washington Post profile with some insight into the author's literary influences and the novel's Norwegian roots,

For instance, this sentence is making a sort of class judgment about a character: "Meirik was from Tromso and spoke a strangely haphazard mixture of Tromso dialect and standard Norwegian."

But unless you know Norwegian geography, and know that Nynorsk and Bokmal are the two official languages of the country — and whatever one you speak says something about where you grew up — the detail would zip right past most readers.

Finally, this BBC item suggests the reality behind one of the novel's themes.