Forty Year Old Classic

Soon to be rocketing to the top of the NYT's Best Sellers List. What they're saying about it:

"A unique book… . al-Azm sought to strip Arab thought of its belief in fate and folk tales and superstition… . He told his people the sort of truths that outsiders are too embarrassed to tell, even when they were themselves able to see these truths." — Fouad Ajami
The 1967 War — which led to the defeat of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt by Israel — felt like an unprecedented and unimaginable disaster for the Arab world at the time. For many, the easiest solution was to shift the blame and to ignore some of the glaring defects of Arab society.

Hailed as one of the foremost Arab intellectuals of recent decades, Sadik al-Azm was one of the few to challenge such a view in his seminal Self-Criticism After the Defeat. In it, he offered a penetrating analysis that probed deep into Arab society, and reasoned that Arabs had to embrace democracy, gender equality, and science to achieve progress.

Self-Criticism After the Defeat represents a milestone in modern Arab intellectual history. It marked a turning point in Arab discourse about society and politics on publication in 1968, and spawned other intellectual ventures into Arab self-criticism. This is the first translation of the work into English.

Author's Bio: Born in Damascus in 1934, Sadik al-Azm is professor emeritus of modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus, Syria. He earned his PhD (1961) from Yale University, and was visiting professor in the department of near Eastern studies at Princeton University until 2008.

Translators Bio: George Stergios is married to Gaye Gentes. 

Read more:
http://www.aljadid.com/content/40-year-old-classic-remains-influential-sadiq-jalal-al-azm%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98-critique-religious-thought%E2%80%99

When I'm Not Blogging

 

When I am not blogging about what I read I am reading but not necessarily blogging. If there is a brief interlude it is usually because I am reading some gravy stained old library copy of some forgotten women author.  There is D.E. Stevenson (her accolytes call themselves Dessies), Elizabeth Goudge, Ann Bridge and no doubt many others. They are usually British, invariably cozy and totally forgettable. I often take out the same copy twice in my confusion over whether I have read it before. Then I notice the particular stain on page 38 and realize I have already read it... Nothing much bad happens and everything is all right in the end. It is my equivalent to a brief pause for a Station Identification Break.

The Sense of an Ending

Another Booker Prize nominee and the actual Booker Mann winner. This is the most obviously well written of the others I have read this year. It is such an English book. Very very crisp and clean story of an older man looking back on an episode in  his young adulthood. Compared to Pigeon English or Jamrach's Menagerie Julian Barnes writes in such a thoughtful, intellectual way, he sets out to examine the nature of history and memory and explores them through the narrative in this novella. The other two novels just sweep you away in a voice or an adventure and while they completely contain you and move you, it's your heart that reacts. Julian Barnes goes for the brain. Completely different organs.

So all of them are excellent but to say one is better than another is comparing apples and oranges.....hey wait, isn't there the Orange Prize? So all we need is an Apple Prize and we can scrap the Booker.

The Marriage Plot

I

It's seems as if lately I can only read books relating to my own situation. Jeffrey Eugenides obviously held off on publishing this until October 2011 just to get one more reader. The Marriage Plot is quite satisfying. Not hugely ambitious but just happy to go along telling a story of three bright young people graduating from Brown and going on with their lives. I cared about the characters and enjoyed their stories, nothing much happens but so what? Since the characters are in college in 1983, the year Eugenides graduated from Brown, Eugenides gets to return to all the courses he probably took and argue with all the  professors through his characters, with the clear eyes of a 50 year old. How much more satisfying could that be?

The Wedding Invitation

Hmm. This looks like a good read.