Here is a selection of literary comment and debate from around the world.
Writing in the Observer, Paul Theroux describes his life as a perpetual alien.
It is the happy, often pompous delusion of the alien that he or she is a witness to an era of significant change. I understand this as a necessary conceit, a survival skill that helps to make the stranger watchful. I lived in England for 18 years, as a pure spectator, from the end of 1971 until the beginning of 1990. I was just an onlooker, gaping at public events that did not involve me. I was a taxpayer, but couldn’t vote; a house owner, but still needed an entry visa; and for quite a while I had to carry an alien identity card.
Having lived for six years in Africa and three in Singapore, I knew how to be an alien. Keep your head down and stay current; save all documents and receipts; take nothing for granted. You are not owed anything. “Nothing personal” is the alien’s motto, because the alien has no security, and no discernible future. I had a family, a wife and small children to protect: I was anxious. “You Yanks,” people sometimes said to me when they heard my accent, as though I needed to be reminded I was an alien. But an alien is reminding himself of that every moment in the foreign country. The alien has to practise cunning to disguise this twitchy state of mind; but insecurity stretches the nerves, heightens the attention and makes the alien remember. Mine wasn’t an era; it was simply 18 years of events. For an alien, life in the foreign country, never completely comprehensible, is always eventful.
Philip Womack discusses the Imperial War Musuem’s exhibition depicting war through 5 children’s books.
‘The Imperial War Museum has just launched Once Upon a Wartime, an exhibition based on five children’s books, ranging from the First World War of War Horse to the story of an ex-child soldier from modern-day Africa, as told in Little Soldier by Bernard Ashley. Scenes from each of the books have been built as life-size sets for children to explore, with models and lectures. It is a fine concept, allowing children to examine the landscapes of their imagination crystallised into reality, and also to encounter frightening concepts at one remove: like looking at the model of a dinosaur.
War displaces, brutalises, makes that which seemed normal into a world of horror. The responses of the chosen books to this, while all different in their settings and structures, share several similarities. Children, thrown into worlds they do not understand, attempt to piece together things that they can grasp, and try to make safe havens of their own using what abilities they possess.’
The Tablet has influential blogger Jason Diamond’s list of the fifty most influential Jewish books of the last century.
The Washington Post reports that the revolutions on Arab Street are beginning to foster censorship in Saudi Arabia, albeit of material advocating terrorism and Islamism.
Comments