The Room and the Chair
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The Nuremburg rallies and the Israeli raid on the flotilla

I'm not suggesting a moral equivalency. I'm just saying that today before the reading I'm doing tonight, I wanted to see the stadiums where the Nazi party held their notorious rallies, and that it was the same day I learned of the Israeli raid on a flotilla of boats intending to bring humanitarian aid to blockaded Gaza. The Israelis killed, as far as we know, 9 people. I wonder at the persistence of terror, the intransigence of fear and how it leads to more terror, more fear, and on and on. 

These images speak to a bleakness I feel.

All that is left of the platform where Hitler stood addressing the throngs

Berlin Synagogue Restoration

  

German plaque describing its fate on Kristallnacht

Dedicated in 1866, its facade has Moorish qualities.

You can see the writing in Hebrew

Detail of one of the doors

A timeline of the synagogue

How the synagogue looked during reconstruction (top) and after Allied bombing destroyed its dome (below)

These are the fragments of the basin where hands were washed before touching the Torah

The Torah, and behind it a photograph of the synagogue in its glory.

Here is what the photograph depicts looks like today. You can see the back of the synagogue in black far back across the empty courtyard.

These are the piece of the pulpit they found in the rubble

One of the windows, with some of its fragments restored, others are missing.

Berlin

The Reichstag after the Battle for Berlin that ended World War II in Europe

The Reichstag as I saw it today

Ahmadis grieving in Lahore

I gave a reading last night at Cafe Hilde in Berlin. Jessa Crispin, founder of Bookslut.com, hosted and asked questions, as did members of the audience. One of them was a young woman from Lahore, where my third novel, the one I'm writing right now is set. Another was Freie University Professor Manan Ahmed, who blogs at Chipati Mystery about South Asia. He's from Lahore also.  

Today I walked around Berlin, which has always been, for me, a place of ghosts. I have trouble here. I see the wreckage instead of the new orderliness that has transplanted it. The bombings that killed 80 at two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore yesterday were with me. I felt, as Manan did on his blog, that we are all Ahmadis. In Berlin it's easy to remember that man's inhumanity to man knows no national or religious boundary. It is everywhere with us, and has always been with us. 

London

I'm in London today promoting The Room and the Chair, which is newly available in the UK from Portobello Books. This morning I did a live radio interview on BBC 4's Today show. It's Radio 4's most popular radio show with 6 million viewers. I arose at 7 a.m. (2 a.m. New York time) and attempted to speak with wit and aplomb, neither of which I possessed. My interviewer was a terrifically awake Sarah Montague. She was joined, via phone from Bristol, by a well-caffienated Nick Davies, a reporter who has written a book called Flat Earth News saying that journalism is in dire straits. Sarah and Nick had all kinds of brilliant objections to my premise that the truth can be gotten at better by fiction than by journalism. By the end of my six minutes and 19 seconds, they'd both convinced me I was rather daft. More interviews this afternoon...

Women Without Men

The Iranian video and photography artist Shirin Neshat has always impressed and moved me. When it comes to visual artists, for me, she's the bomb, the ultimate genius.  She's been working on the feature film Women Without Men--her first--for seven years. I saw it last night at the Quad Cinema on 13th Street.

The review in the New York Times, which I'm glad I didn't read beforehand because it gave away so much of the movie, honored the work. Yet the review doesn't do justice to the film's power or its bravery. As Neshat said in her introduction last night to the film, so much of Iranian art and literature that reaches the West concerns the aftermath of the Islamic revolution of 1979. That makes Iran seem a static nightmare. Here, Neshat turns to a more dynamic historical turning point that has been relatively ignored: the British and American supported overthrow of the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh and the reinstallation of the Shah to power.  

Neshat's portrayal of this politically rich time comes from an adaptation of Shahmush Parsipur's magical realist novel set in 1953 Tehran during the days leading to the military coup. The novel, regarded by many as a masterpiece, allows Neshat's visual acumen and imagination to shine. Some of the images from the film are stunningly effective. I just hope people see the film.

The Times Square Bomber

This week at the Guggenheim party I ran into a number of people who were surprised I was writing a novel based in Pakistan. Perhaps they asked because a Pakistani man confessed to the almost-bombing last Saturday in Times Square. They wondered what motivated him, and whether Lahore, where my novel is based, was a place I had visited. Was it safe there? The last question is easy--mostly Lahore is safe, but every so often they have bombs that actual explode, in which women, children and the elderly die or are wounded. Pakistan is at war, an ally who is trying to root out militants in its remote regions. Sometimes, we kill civilians when we bomb from our drone aircraft.  And Saturday night, someone from Pakistan tried to bring the war to New York. 

I can't pretend to know what motivated Faisal Shahzad. My first novel Harbor is about the allure of terrorism to young Muslim men from a small town in Algeria called Arzew, but it doesn't seek a definitive answer the way policy makers or young men writing non-fiction books on terrorism do. It's a book that dwells in possibility, to borrow from Emily Dickinson. One of the things I learned from talking to Algerians was how little religious ideology was the inspiration for their first contemplating radical violence. They wanted their lives to have meaning in the midst of a lingering sense of helplessness. Sometimes they felt this because of politics, but more often it sprang from the frustration of being born into societies in which humiliation and indignity seemed inevitable. More than anything, it was a sense of emptiness that agitated them. But that of course doesn't fit into the language of policy conferences, scholars, punditry or the non-fiction books serious readers seem to prefer to read.

   

Tombs I have visited

 

So Many Literary Events Not Enough Time

The coming days are chockablock with literary doings that I would love to attend. I can only be in one place at one time, so I'm going to be missing more of these than I'd like. 

Sat. May 1. Anne Carson @ McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince St. between Lafayette and Mulberry at 7 pm. Her newest work, Nox, is a box containing a single sheet of pleated paper covered in images and text. Free.

Sat. May 1. Toni Morrison and South African novelist Marlene van Niekerk discuss literature and politics with K. Anthony Appiah @ Cooper Union 7 E. 7th St. at Third Ave. at 3 pm. $10. 

Sat. May 1. Philip Gourevitch, novelist Arnon Grunberg, Sebastian Junger, Daniele Mastrogiacomo and Deborah Amos discuss war reporting at (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleeker at Thompson St. at 3:30 pm. $10. 

Sun. May 2. Chilean revolutionary and novelist Ariel Dorfman in conversation with Tablet magazine writer Gabriel Sanders @ the Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Pl. at 3:30 pm. $15.

Sun. May 2. Black Sheep & Exploding Turbans: A Guernica/PEN Event. Paul Berman, Alina Bronsky, Peter Stamm, Janne Teller and Sadanand Dhume discuss Muslims in Europe. Moderated by Sudanese novelist Jamal Mahjoub. @ Powerhouse Arena, 37 Main St. Brooklyn at  5 .m. Free. 

Tues. May 4. "How to Write About Africa." Judith Stone, Binyavanga Wainaina, Sarah Bloom and Deo @ KGB Bar, 85 E. 4th St.   7 pm. Free.

Tues. May 4. Julie Orringer @ Book Court, 163 Court St. between Dean and Pacific, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn at 7 pm. Free. 

Readings from around the globe

Last night I went to the PEN World Voices Festival opening reading at the 92nd Street Y. There were nine writers and one rock star who calls herself a poet. Mohsin Hamid from Pakistan, Yiyun Li from China, Daniele Mastrogiacomo from Italy, Sofi Oksanen from Estonia, Atiq Rahimi from Afghanistan, Alberto Ruy-Sanchez from Mexico, Andrzej Stasiuk from Poland, Miguel Syjuco from the Philippines and two superstars, the ubiquitous Salman Rushdie and the embarrasing Patti Smith. 

I was enthralled by some of the writers--Daniele Mastrogiacomo, Sofi Oksanen, Yiyun Li and Andrzej Stasiuk. Karachi-born Mastrogiacomo, a Swiss Italian journalist kidnapped by the Taliban in 2007, read from his gorgeous account of his own imprisonment. The man was a poet. He was humble, never the swashbuckler. The scene he read in Italian, with an English translation accompanying him, was sharply drawn. Finnish novelist Oksanen read with a fierceness and cadence that was matched by the English translation scrolling on a screen behind her. I was captivated by her story of two sisters in 1940s Estonia. She'll be speaking again tomorrow at 5 pm about the novel she read from, "Purge." Yiyun Li, whom I met years ago in London and have never failed to be astonished by, read from "The Vagrants," a novel set during China's Cultural Revolution. (She'll be reading again tomorrow at 3:30 pm. and Saturday May 1st at Idlewild Books.) Stasiuk, a Polish novelist, impressed me with his searching passages about a teenage girl and men streaming out of an urban factory. He'll be reading again tomorrow at 3 p.m.

Unfortunately a couple writers--Atiq Rahimi and Patti Smith--were dreadful.

The case of Rahimi reminded me once again that just because one is from a culture with rich stories that no one is telling, that does not make one a writer. We turn to Khaled Hosseini and Rahimi because we long to know Afghanistan. But both are writers who too often feel comfortable with melodrama, sentimentality and cliche. Rahimi's prose was yet another reminder of how Afghanistan's prolonged wars have scarred its society so deeply. 

As for Patti Smith, she may be a rock star I danced to in college, but a poet she will never be. Her ode to Roberto Bolano was atrocious and when she broke into a warble wishing him a happy birthday it was faux-intellectualism at its most risible. 

Reaction to Diversity Test Panel

Guernica magazine has posted the video of the PEN World Voices Festival panel I was on with Claire Messud, Alex Epstein, Esther Allen and Norman Rush. 

Here's a bit of commentary on the panel from WNYC's blog. 

The Mantle, the festival's official blog, posted this about the panel. 

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