"Christoper Hitchens's Letters to a Young Contrarian deals with the knotted ethics of thinking about and observing authoritarian places. I relied on this slim volume extensively when I faced difficult questions about my book and whom it ultimately served."
I've seen reference to this book, probably a bit marred by the experience of Peter K's intense hero-worship, I never paid attention. I am curious, though, since in any discussions I remember about the book, here or elsewhere, I've never seen it characterized this way. Is this an accurate description of some of what you might find in the book?
to consolidate posts, I thought I'd include the rest of her suggestions for those interested -- and especially to find out if anyone has read any of the below. I've seen Persopolis 2 already since Yoshie mentioned it here if I recall:
"For the sheer beauty of its storytelling, I keep returning to Marie Arana's American Chica, an elegant memoir of belonging to two cultures with a subtle theme: We are what we make of the mix, not what the mix makes of us.
Anahita Firouz's In the Walled Gardens is one of the few gradeful treatments of revolutionary Iran in novel form.
the interplay of language, personality, and identity have preoccupied me for years, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation offers a mannered, intellectually unsparing exploration of how language shapes how one both thinks and feels about the world.
...
Ryszard Kapuscinski's atmospheric, passionate snapshots of the revolution in Shah of Shahs are emotionally definitive. He captures the spiritual turmoil that makes Iranian politics so capricious and intricate.
The intimacies and bonds of traditional cultures are captured by Fatimeh Mernissi in her The Harem Within, all deep insight and delicious story-telling, as she recounts her Moroccan girlhood.
Roy Mottahedeh's Mantle of the Prophet tells the story of a young cleric's intellectual and theological journey through the world of Qom and beyond. It's written and brilliantly conceived. If I wanted to understand Iran and Islam seriously, this is the book I would read and re-read for years.
A rare collection of contemporary Iranian literature, both poetry and prose, in translation, Nahid Mozafarri's Strange Times, My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature showcases how Iranian writers have processed the last century's upheavals in their art. The strength here lies less in the translations than in the strategems some writers use to evade censorship -- well-observed in the West through Iranian cinema, but less noticed on the page.
Afshin Molavi's The Soul of Iran takes you to Iran's most distant corners. It is a wise guided tour that expertly reminds us of the wide-ranging desire for a different society.
In My Uncle Napolean, Iraj Pizishkzad spins an epic tale around and Iranian patriarch who believes the country's destiny lies in the hands of the British. It is a window onto both a devastating Iranian tendency -- the deferral of responsibility for one's prevailing condition -- and a native response to autocracy: satire.
Salman Rushdie's allegory of Pakistan, Shame, is one of the two books I have kept at my bedside for years. It's a reminder that we can purge our disappointment at catastrophic events and countries through literature -- and hopefully move on.
Marjan Satrapi's memoir-in-comic-strips, Perspolis 2, captures the absurdity and pain of coping with the place Iran has become.Her stark graphics are exhilarating in their originality, wrenching and fearless.
In In the Eye of the Sun Ahdaf Soueif takes up, in decidedly long form, the quest of an Arab woman to find emotional and sexual fulfillment while swinging between the deceptive openness of the West and the cloying intimacy of the East.
shag
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