Nobel Peace Prize nominations

Yesterday, Anthony Appiah, the current president of PEN American Center, published a letter nominating Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing Liu’s “distinguished and principled leadership in the area of human and political rights and freedom of expression.”

Appiah’s letter was endorsed by a number of prominent PEN members, among them Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Jhumpa Lahiri, and several of the writers who rallied for Liu Xiaobo on New Year’s Eve, including Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, and A.M. Homes (pictured right is a sign from the rally; the photo was taken by Brian Montopoli).

Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama have also asked the Nobel committee to consider Liu for the Peace Prize.

Ma Zhaoxu, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, “said it would be a mistake to give Liu such an award,” according to Ben Blanchard and Huang Yan of Reuters:

“If the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to such a person, it is obvious that it is totally wrong,” Ma told a regular news briefing in Beijing, without elaborating.

No citizen of China has ever won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile, according to the AP, the head of Norway’s Conservative Party, Erna Solberg, nominated Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and her group Memorial for the Prize. PEN worked with Memorial to honor Natalia Estemirova, who was affiliated with Memorial, in October. Estemirova herself spoke with David Remnick about slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya at a 2006 PEN World Voices event; you can listen to their conversation at PEN.org.

Notes on a Wednesday

After discovering that Barack Obama is a fan of Philip Roth (and David Grossman), Jeffrey Goldberg asked readers for "a couple of paragraphs describing what a Philip Roth-influenced Obama White House would look like." And he's picked a couple of winners.

Rumbles have been brewing in the usually peaceful worlds of literary magazines and literary translation. I'm looking forward to the "mini-manifesto" from VQR editor Ted Genoways.

I'm also looking forward to Franzen's answer.

Our editor, M Mark, is headed to Jamaica this week to participate in the Calabash Literary Festival, which aims to "transform the literary arts in the Caribbean." She'll be joining PEN America 8 contributor Chris Abani, among other great authors, and will be featured on a panel about editing collections.

And the PEN Literary Awards ceremony was a treat. PEN.org should have audio soon. (Photo below by Beowulf Sheehan; that's Jonathan Ames among the winners.)

David Grossman on Israel and Myth

PEN America 8 features a conversation about re-writing myth called “In the Beginning,” with David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Anne Provoost, and Jeanette Winterson, moderated by Colum McCann. Early on, Grossman (pictured left, in a portrait by Beowulf Sheehan) tells a wonderful story:

Many years ago, when I put my eldest son to bed, I told him, “This is the longest night of the year.” It was the 21st of December. At first light the next day he burst into our room, covered with sweat, and shouted, “Dad, Mom, it’s over! This night is over!” He was like Adam, the first man on Earth, wandering through an endless night, not knowing if the sun would rise again—and how relieved he must have been when the sun rose. The year after that, he told his younger brother, “This is going to be the longest night of the year”—and he said it with an air of indifference. He had found shelter in science and empirical experience. I could not help thinking of him as exiled from the primal, the more loaded feelings one has without this buffering shell, this armor of science and knowledge.

I am sure that my child will eventually look, as we are all looking, for this primal night, when we wandered alone. We look for it in legends, in stories, in myths.

Grossman told this story in April 2006. A few months later, the younger son in the story was killed in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, three days after Grossman—along with Amoz Oz and A.B. Yehosua—held a press conference calling for a cease-fire. Uri Grossman was in a tank struck by a Hezbollah missile.

Grossman spoke of his son’s death in his Freedom to Write Lecture, delivered one year after the conversation quoted above (both events were part of the World Voices festival). I thought of it again while reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s cover story in the current Atlantic Monthly, which divulges that Grossman has finished a novel “about an Israeli soldier, a tank commander, who goes to a big military operation,” and whose “mother has a kind of premonition that he’s going to be killed.” She refuses to “be at home when the army comes to announce the death of her son,” so she “starts a walk across Israel… and she tells the story of her son’s life.” Grossman started writing the novel just before Uri began his military service. According to Goldberg, the novel will be published in Israel this spring, and Goldberg believes it “could have a seismic effect on Israelis, who have, in their 60th year of independence, grown tired of losing their sons to war.”

(Also at The Atlantic, Goldberg interviews Barack Obama, who says that he can “remember reading The Yellow Wind [Grossman’s “exposé of the occupation and its demoralizing effects on Palestinians, and on the Israelis who enforced it”] when it came out,” and that his “intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris.”)

Weekend notes

English PEN is creating an Online World Atlas that will, eventually, tell you “everything you need to know about the world’s great writers and emerging voices.” Here’s the thing: “All the content is added by you: readers and writers who want to pass on your tips and create a new global community of readers.” It’s a work in progress, so, if you’re interested, go help out.

Triboro Pictures is producing a movie, The Fragile Mistress, based on Leora Skolkin-Smith’s novel Edges, which was edited and published by the late Grace Paley. They’ve gotten permission to shoot the movie in Jordan and Israel, and now just need to raise the money...

FENCE is emulating Radiohead: Donate any amount between now and the end of April and get a subscription to the excellent magazine for one year.

Amitava Kumar posted a lovely write-up of the Philip Roth birthday tribute:

All this while, the panelists were aware that the man himself was sitting in the front row, looking at them, the fingers of each hand lightly pressed against the other in front of his mouth. He was like a judge watching the lawyers presenting their case, all the young men appearing to be in agreement with each other on the court floor.

You can also listen to the event.

Lastly, Bill Johnston won a much-deserved award from the Polish Cultural Institute for his terrific translation of New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz, published by the excellent Archipelago Books. One of my favorite poems from the collection appears in PEN America 8: Making Histories (which you can order here); it’s called “Regression in die Ursuppe” (that last word is German for something like “primordial soup”). Here’s how it begins:

in the beginning was a thick
soup which under the influence
of light (and heat)

produced life

from the soup emerged a creature
or rather something
that transformed itself into yeast
into a chimpanzee
eventually god came along
and created humans
man and woman
sun cat and tick

humans invented the wheel
wrote Faust

and began printing
paper money....

PS. The photos above were submitted by Boria Sax and Susan Shapiro for the mixed media project mentioned below. And don't forget to check out the online confessional, too...

A question for literary scholars...

Speaking of Amitava, we’ve now put up on PEN.org a great conversation between him and Ilija Trojanow, a brilliant writer and publisher who writes in German but who has lived all over. We’ve also put up a bit of Ilija’s novel about Richard Burton (pictured left) called The Collector of Worlds and newly translated by Will Hobson.

Ilija is uncommonly thoughtful in the way he approaches the lives he imagines, but that effort—giving fictional life to historical figures—seems to be on the rise. We have other examples in PEN America 8: Rodrigo Fresán depicting J.M. Barrie, for instance (with cameos by Bob Dylan and others); Italian guerilla novelists “Wu Ming” dreaming up intrigue in Rome in the 1950s (the central character in the piece we included is Cary Grant, shortly to become a spy).

No doubt our readers know of many other recent examples: Russell Banks, David Leavitt, Katharine Weber, Arthur Japin, Janna Levin, Edmund White—the list is long and distinguished. The alternate histories published recently by Philip Roth and Michael Chabon also warrant mentioning.

So is this a burgeoning phenomenon? Has historical fiction really become a larger part of the literary landscape over the last few years? And if so, why?

(See also: "Inventing the Past.")