| Friday, May 2, 2008 9:53AM | | | | American Lit Seen from Abroad | Posted By: Aaron Hamburger
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TimesTalks: American Literature as Seen from Abroad
In this panel, Times editor Bill Goldstein interviewed UK author Ian McEwan, Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, and Saudi author Yousef Al-Mohaimeed on the influence (or lack thereof) of American literature on their work.
I was particularly interested to hear this panel, not only for the star power of Ian McEwan (though that helped) but also because in New York we often forget that the literary world extends beyond the island of Manhattan, let alone the rest of the world. Of course I know that pop culture has an influence far beyond American shores, but I was curious to hear if our literary works had any of the same shadow.
The answer was a resounding yes, but in ways you might not expect.
In McEwan’s case, the influence mostly boiled down to what was described as the great “triptych” of American writers, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and then (I thought or maybe hoped he would add Bernard Malamud, but…) John Updike, who as McEwan put it, “exploded into my consciousness.” The reason? McEwan saw UK literature during the sixties and seventies in a profound state of doldrums, immersed in the minutiae of divorce. In addition, continental European literature seemed to be stuck in the High Modernist mode, “mostly a lot of guys staring at walls, waiting in anonymous hotel rooms for visitors who never came.” American literature, by contrast, seemed daringly of the now, filled with the subversive humor of Roth, the graceful combination of high and low in Bellow, and the topicality of Updike, rendered in his famously beautiful sentences.
For Wainaina, growing up in Kenya, America was in some ways a more real place than Kenya. Wainaina talked about the odd phenomenon of watching American television programming like Little House on the Prairie and saying to himself, “I can see myself there!” As a result, in some ways Wainaina says he feels more comfortable writing Kenyan characters who speak English in a New York accent than in a Nairobi accent.
As for Al-Mohaimeed, the paucity of work in English translated into Arabic has meant that a number of important novels simply aren’t there to be learned from in the Arabic-speaking world. However, it was interesting to hear about the smattering of works that have been translated, like the work of Hemingway, Faulkner (Al-Mohaimeed singled out the story “A Rose for Emily” as something he particularly admired), and the poet Rita Dove. Interestingly, Al-Mohaimeed mentioned that the works of the beats like Kerouac’s On the Road and Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” had had the most influence on Arabic writers today because of their challenge to authority, which Arabic authors working under authoritarian regimes could relate to.
In a sign of the times, moderator Goldstein noted that all three authors had had run-ins with authorities while trying to get into this country, including Al-Mohaimeed that afternoon. After landing at JFK, the Saudi author was detained for more than three hours in a room without being allowed to ask any questions. Finally, he was let go. When he asked why he’d been detained, he was told it was because this was his first visit to the U.S.. If he came back, the officer told him, he probably wouldn’t be detained for more than three minutes. Al-Mohaimeed suggested that he probably would not come back.
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1 Comment | Add a Comment |
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| 5-3-08 11:54PM: Marlon said...
Aaron!
You're the first person I've come across to agree with me that the best 9/11 novel may very well have come before the event, Jennifer Egan's Look at Me. I taught a course on 9/11 novels last year and to this day I've yet to come across a more dead-on rendering of the personality and motivation of a potential terrorist than the one in her novel. What events are you covering tomorrow? We should meet up.
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