Let’s All Go Read The Blind Owl

I recently read Tablet & Pen for a review and interview with Publishers Weekly, and it’s a very impressive achievement. The book is essentially an anthology of 20th-century prose and poetry from the Middle East, Turkey, the subcontinent, and North Africa (somewhat derivatively summed up as an “Arabic anthology”), but it’s that rare anthology that actually works like an anthology should. What I mean by that is the book is extremely well laid-out, so it can be read straight though (which is impossible with most anthologies), and so that the individual pieces therein create a genuine dialogue between regions, languages, religions, traditions, etc. The book is also very well contextualized, which is important in and of itself, and which also helps the two points I Just explained.

One of the novels excerpted in Tablet & Pen is the novel The Blind Owl (widely described at the greatest Persian novel of the 20th century), and I think it might be the single best thing in that 700-page book. It’s this kind of magical realist story of love, eroticism, and nostalgia set in the middle of the Iranian desert, and it held me captivated.

So I was extremely pleased to just discover that Grove is re-releasing their old translation of The Blind Owl with an introduction by Porochista Khakpour (which can be read here). With translation finally getting some serious attention, and with people interested to read fiction from the Middle East, perhaps this book will get the attention the excerpt I read would imply it merits.

DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.

The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.

Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.

Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.

A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.

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