The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

Nota Bene the author of the 2008 Man Booker Prize–nominated A Case of Exploding Mangoes. The Life’s Too Short Literary Review is bold, brash, sassy, designconscious, intelligent, and cuttingedge—and that is saying a lot for a debut enterprise which needs the readers’ and writers’ unequivocal support. It is finely written, stylishly curated, and well worth noticing, and one deeply hopes that this magazine’s life span is not as ironic as its cleverly worded subaltern title. Sudeep Sen New Delhi Orhan Pamuk. The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist. Nazim Dikbaş, tr. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. 2010. 208 pages. $22.95. ISBN 978-0-674-05076-1 T. S. Eliot once remarked that winning the Nobel Prize was the ticket to one’s own funeral. Not so with 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, whose recent collection of essays are the work of a writer at the height of his career. Aside from minor edito- rial alterations, the essays mirror the Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard University in September 2009, with the addition of an epilogue stating the challenge imposed by a fifty-minute time limit. The result, expressed in the prose of a master stylist, is brevity and clarity rare in theoretical studies of the novel. The image opening and closing the lectures comes from Anna Karenina, a novel Pamuk considers the greatest of all time and from whose pages he recalls the scene when Anna, en route to St. Petersburg, gazes through the train window at the falling snow. The image calls to mind the lyrical description of snow with which Joyce’s finest story, “The Dead,” closes and with which Pamuk’s 2002 novel, Snow, opens. Image in the novel is everything for Pamuk. “Novels,” he argues, “are essentially visual literary fictions.” Though true of Pamuk’s novels and many he admires—excepting the striking counterexample of Dostoyevsky—the claim is flawed: it presumes all readers visualize and assumes all novelists privilege visuality over other senses. Contestable, too, is Pamuk’s assertion that no other literary form can rival the novel’s richness. If genres are fashions reflecting social forces, aesthetics, and tastes, then the novel is no more exceptional than the lyric, the epic, the tragedy—all of which have had their heyday. Readers may take similar issue with Pamuk’s last chapter, “The Center,” which emphasizes a popular and misleading distinction between the literary and genre novel. All literature is generic; Borges and Poe made literature of detective fiction; and Pamuk, perhaps overtaken by his veneration for his chosen genre, mistakenly refers to Qurratulain Hyder Fireflies in the Mist New Directions Hyder (1926–2007) received the Jnanpith Award, the Indian equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize, for Fireflies in the Mist. Set in Bangladesh, the novel delves into the religious friction between the Muslims and Hindus. Praised by both Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, Hyder excelled in bringing her characters off the page and into life. Kona MacPhee Perfect Blue Bloodaxe In a lyrical but detached voice, these poems encompass the entire human existence and detail both the fragility and joy of life in an “intimate connection to the world” (Poetry Review). This is MacPhee’s second book of verse. May – June 2011 ı 77 world literature in review Borges as a novelist. Pamuk’s title, a nod to Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 essay, recalls as well John Le Carré’s 1971 suspense novel, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. If the novel evades classification, then it is with uneasy ease that critics slip into the quicksand of definition. Perhaps Pamuk’s predecessor, E. M. Forster, offers the simplest description in his 1927 lectures, Aspects of the Novel: “Any fictitious prose work over fifty thousand words.” Lamenting that Forster’s genre study has fallen out of fashion, Pamuk believes that its reputation should be restored. I couldn’t agree more. Like Forster’s earlier work, Pamuk’s is also a craft study that does not present a unified theory of the novel, nor does it claim to. Pamuk writes from a practitioner’s point of view. Weaving literary criticism with autobiography, the lectures draw on the optimism of Michel de Montaigne, to whom Pamuk credits his courage to speak frankly for all novelists through the novels he himself has written. To assert that an individual might speak for all humanity is neither sentimental nor naïve, but one article of faith at the center of the novel, the artistry of which is impossible not to admire in the work of Orhan Pamuk. Thomas Patrick Wisniewski Harvard University Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Temporada de zopilotes. Mexico City. Planeta. 2010 (©2009). 155 pages. $9.95. ISBN 978607-07-0116-0 A major event in the history of Mexico was recently revisited by one of the sharpest Mexican writers, Paco Ignacio Taibo II. In his Temporada de zopilotes, Taibo recounts the events of the Decena Trágica (the Tragic Ten), 78 ı World Literature Today the ten-day coup d’état that ended with the assassination of President Francisco I. Madero in February 1913. The book does not extend back to the events of the Revolution of 1910, which brought Madero to the presidency and ended the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Instead, Taibo’s account follows the days of the actual revolution, tracing the actions of the most important individuals, mainly generals and ambassadors, during this time. These were the men responsible for organizing and executing the final attack on the national palace and for the imprisonment of President Madero, his brother Gustavo, Vice President Pino Suárez, and General Felipe Ángeles. Taibo also explores the role of Henry Lane Wilson, who at the time served as the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and who, according to this book, hated Madero and his government. The book’s portrayal of Wilson’s animosity toward Madero, demonstrated through an accounting of Wilson’s heavy political intervention, exposes the atrocious lies Wilson reported to Washington. Historical documents support the accounts throughout. Temporada de zopilotes is divided into thirty-three segments, with the final one dedicated to the historical sources. Each of the vignettes follows an individual or an event as if assembling the pieces of a puzzle. The book includes the horrific violence that marked this period, such as the brutal assassination of Gustavo Madero. The segment dedicated to Victoriano Huerta, perhaps the biggest traitor in Mexican history, reveals Huerta’s ambitions and offers a short biography. Huerta’s rise to power ignited the bloodiest period of the revolutionary years, 1914–17. The death of General Bernardo Reyes, one of the leaders of the coup, is also noteworthy. This general, a major military figure, was also the father of one of the most renowned Mexican writers of all time, Alfonso Reyes. The historical events described in Temporada de zopilotes provide a complement to the history many readers may already know, as well