Articles Tagged “War ”
George Tabori
On July 23 the theater director, playwright and writer George Tabori died. Unfortunately, Mr. Tabori is not widely known outside Germany and Austria. His relative obscurity doesn't do justice to the quality of his texts. (I cannot judge the quality of Mr. Tabori as a theater director. I have never seen…...read more »
Returning to Afghanistan
While publishers, agents and some authors were heading for Frankfurt for the annual book fair I decided to return to Afghanistan—or to be more precise Oruzgan, a small province in the south—where some 1,600 Dutch soldiers are trying to rebuild the country. A year ago I stayed at Kandahar Air…...read more »
A Foot Patrol in Oruzgan, Afghanistan
Recently I flew from Afghanistan to the Netherlands along with some Dutch troops going on R&R for two weeks. A day later, I traveled to Paris to promote a book. The difference could not have been bigger. Seated in the apartment of my French publisher on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, I had a conversation…...read more »
High Noon in Linz
I grew up without weapons. While nobody in my family was a vegetarian—or ever thought of becoming one—I was taught that hunting was a pastime for those who despised science and art. The philosopher Roger Scruton would have vehemently disagreed with my education, but no matter. When I was…...read more »
Embedded in Iraq
While looking for something else, I recently stumbled upon Cynthia Ozick's essay íPublic Intellectualsë in her collection Quarrel and Quandary. The essay itself is worth reading—as is the whole collection—but this sentence stuck to my mind: íSelf-blame can be the highest…...read more »
Preparations for a Close Escape
In preparation for my trip to Iraq in May, I have now met with two war correspondents. One of them is an American. We met in a bar in Brooklyn. The other is a Dutch war correspondent with whom I had dinner in Amsterdam. The American correspondent was a man who is more or less my age. As is often the…...read more »
The Background Noise in Iraq
Last week I was embedded with the 25th infantry division north of Baghdad in the so-called Sunni Triangle. Presently I'm in the Green Zone. A friend of mine in New York asked me to pay attention to the noise here. He had been informed that on most military bases in Iraq, one could hear a permanent noise…...read more »
The Future of Literature
Two days after I left Iraq, I traveled to a small resort at the Black Sea for a writer's conference about the future of literature. For some reason it seemed to me the right sequence: first Baghdad and then a conference about the future of literature. I have been to a few literary festivals, but this…...read more »
Reading Gregor von Rezzori
A Dutch newspaper asked me to review the recently published Dutch translation of Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. I have to admit that the name Rezzori vaguely rang a bell, but that was about it. He is much better known in the US, where Memoirs of an Anti-Semite was published in the New…...read more »
An Invisible Cabal in the Sky
On August 7th, Russia responded to a Georgian attack on the capital of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali, with a massive deployment of troops across the border and attacks on the Georgian cities of Gori and Poti. This open act of aggression brought an end to the "frozen conflict" between the countries that has…...read more »
Truth and War Literature
As of Monday September 8, I've been teaching at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Not forever, thank God, just for one semester. One course that I'm teaching side-by-side with a philosopher is about Plato's Symposium. I'm not a Plato specialist, and neither is the philosopher. For close reading,…...read more »
Words with Borders…and Borders and Borders
With regrets for the delay in commenting on this, here's an interesting piece from the New York Times on the complicated and often confounding interplay of language, culture and politics in the Caucasus. It's an intriguing look at the fate of the lingua franca that falls out of grace, and provides some…...read more »
A Treaty of Love
After my trip to Lebanon in the spring of 2007, I traveled to London to interview the Lebanese-Palestinian author Samir El-Youssef. El-Youssef has a beautiful and contagious laugh. That was the first thing I noticed over lunch in a Lebanese restaurant. The second thing that became clear was that El-Youssef…...read more »
Letter from Iraq
The young captain sat on his bed and sighed. íThere are not too many people around here I can talk with,ë he said. íAll the young guys talk about is women and fighting.ë This is my second trip to Iraq. Part of the trip is an embed with the 25th infantry division of the 1st brigade,…...read more »
Reading Keret: Front-line of the Hyper-real
In his first blog post for our online book club on Etgar Keret's Girl on the Fridge, Adam Rovner discusses the hyper-real in Keret's story "The Night the Buses Died." We hope you'll read this and the other essays in the series and join in with your comments.—Editors Keret's "The…...read more »
Brutal Banality in Keret’s “An Exclusive”
At nearly nine pages, "An Exclusive" is the lengthiest story in Etgar Keret's Girl on the Fridge. Perhaps because it's the longest, it's one of my favorites. Keret is known as a stylist of economy, of idiom, and of the manipulation of powerful cultural allusion. "An Exclusive" demonstrates…...read more »
An Athenian Story…from Vietnam
This is the third installment of a series of "Athenian Stories" from Gazmend Kapllani as a complement to our Greek issue this month. In these short dispatches, Kapllani documents the experience of immigrants living in Athens, one of the most diverse cities in southern Europe. Links are available at the…...read more »
My Favorite Etgar Keret Story: A Brief Appreciation
When I saw Etgar Keret at the PEN World Voices Festival last year I was disappointed because he chose to read “Hat Trick,” a story that is as unsettling in its implications as it is gruesome. The reason for my dismay, besides the squirminess that story makes me feel, was that the brutality…...read more »
An Athenian Story…from Afghanistan
This is the fourth installment in a series of "Athenian Stories" from Gazmend Kapllani as a complement to our Greek issue this month. In these short dispatches, Kapllani documents the experience of immigrants living in Athens, one of the most diverse cities in southern Europe. Links are available at…...read more »
The Way You Speak about a Cold
Moldova is a forgotten country. Even in Europe, many people hardly know of its existence. Forgotten countries are often poor, and this is also the case with Moldova. It's one of the poorest countries in Europe. Recently, Moldova made it into the international press. Demonstrations against its communist…...read more »
Review: “A Girl Made of Dust” by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi
Writing literary fiction with a child's point-of-view is not a job for the faint-hearted; to construct a compelling narrative with only a linguistically-limited and innocent voice as a conduit is a daunting challenge, one which few novelists have taken up and still fewer pulled off successfully. Yet…...read more »
“The Patience Stone” by Atiq Rahimi
In Afghanistan—where, eight years after the toppling of the Taliban by US and allied troops, women are still routinely arrested and jailed for “running away” or for adultery, where current law does not recognize the crime of rape, and where 70 to 80 per cent of marriages are forced—any…...read more »
War and politics in Angola
In some ways the novel Mayombe resembles an old World War II movie. A rugged military officer and his closest friend are fighting for a better life, but their passion for the same woman tests their friendship and their commitment to the struggle. But this time the two men aren’t GIs in Normandy…...read more »
Illustrating Conflict: Perspectives from FIBDA
Under the heading "Algiers, Bubbles without Frontiers," this year's International Comics Festival of Algiers (Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Alger, or FIBDA) provides an important space for discussions and works around history, war, and conflict. I previously wrote about…...read more »