This beautiful little love story has some extraordinary bits about the Syrian revolution, the subsequent civil war(s), love, families, sectarian sentiments, and the sea: On the second day of Ramadan, I come home from work to find Jesus, Maalik, and Qais sitting on the back steps, vaguely matching in short-sleeved plaid shirts, whiling away the […]
In an extraordinary essay titled “The Smell of Infrastructure,” Bruce Robbins argues that the scaffolding of our lives, the infrastructure that carries shit and coal and lobsters and water and electricity is often made invisible. He has a rousing call to arms: Infrastructure needs to be made visible, of course, in order to see how our […]
John McPhee has taught David Remnick and Richard Stengel and a few other famous journalists to write, and apparently he is a fixture of The New Yorker, but his work is so much more interesting that those of his proteges, and I don’t ever remember having read his pieces in the New Yorker. I would have remembered […]
Hav is like a nested doll. There is an original fictional travelogue published in 1987 embedded within the arc of a narrative that updates the story originally published in 1987 with “the events”; with the resulting diptych published in 2007. Then this embedded story is itself embedded within the life of the travel-writer/popular historian/fiction-writer, Jan Morris. Jan […]
I have just finished a prize winning Manuel Vázquez Montalbán detective novel with Pepe Carvalho as its central character, The South Seas. I was also a devotee of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series (who was named in honour of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán). And of course Jean-Claude Izzo has been a revelation. What all the novels have in common are middle […]
Imagine a trans-textual “proletarian” protagonist, one that has travelled the world, gets stuck into adventures aboard ships and on land, and has a laconic easy sarcasm and a way with words. A kind of working class Marlowe with a better sense of humour and no penchant for imperial condescension. Imagine, then, that this character […]
It is extraordinarily rare to read someone whose work haunts you and then becomes part of your personal canon. That you wake in the middle of the night wanting to look at the map of his imaginary geography. The last time this happened to me was with Roberto Bolaño. But my new discovery, courtesy of […]
From Hegel through Schmitt to Foucault and onwards, there is a way of thinking about sea and land not as inert backdrop but as factors determining politics, history and the transformation of the world. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History is geographically deterministic and intensely racialised. His reading of Africa and Africans doesn’t even bear thinking about. And […]
“Let us have the courage to be crude: let us sweep the spirit of subtlety down the sewer along with the flags and the great warriors.” Paul Nizan Paul Nizan’s star burned bright and brief. He was a classmate of Jean-Paul Sartre‘s at École Normale Supérieure and a member of the French Communist Party who resigned his membership […]
Do you remember that haunting Conrad quotation from Heart of Darkness that says “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” It is amazing and powerful, and […]
