Monday 25 August 2008

Expanding Horizons


There's a little shop run by a Pakistani gentleman close to the house where I used to live in England. I was in there earlier in the year and observing the rows of half-empty shelves, casually asked whether he was perhaps closing down soon.

'No, no', he said with a chuckle. 'Actually, we're expanding.'

And sure enough, soon after he opened up another shop a couple of doors down.

So it is with this blog site. My devotees may have noted the empty months of silence and erroneously concluded the end was nigh, but actually, fear not, we're just getting warmed up. Yes, we're expanding. In fact there are all sorts of developments planned in the coming months.

The year so far has been something of a wipe out on the blogging front due to a triple whammy of interlinked events. Firstly I was very busy supervising the building work on my new house in England, which from start to finish took a full year. I had imagined that the building work would be tricky and time consuming, but what I hadn't quite realised is how consuming the finishing touches are.

For months it seemed as if my life was overwhelmed with decisions about paint colours, tiles, floorings, endless pieces of furniture, light fixtures, curtains, shutters, blinds, bathroom furniture, kitchen appliances and so on and so on. All very excruciating, but the final result I am relieved to report is most pleasing.


Then of course there was all the business of moving - which is a trauma all of its own - and finally the small matter of the birth of my first child at the end of May. Here is a picture of me with the little lad in the new kitchen.

Fear not, dear readers, the trials and tribulations of builders, movers and parenthood have not diverted me from making some progress with a few book projects I currently have in the pipeline.

For one of these, as mentioned a few times on previous blogs, I have been delving a little bit into a variety of the world's great but relatively unknown (in the West at least) literature. I've been ploughing on with Arabic literature (which is where I think you left me back in January) and got considerably side-tracked by the whole Orientalist debate. Impressed by Robert Irwin's excellent Penguin Anthology of Arabic Literature, I was persuaded to read his more recent tome For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, which I'm afraid to report is an enormous disappointment, very dull to read (despite the lives of the various Arabists discussed being intrinsically fascinating).

The book is basically a nitpicking and ultimately futile rebuttal of Edward Said's Orientalism and doesn't really make any sense unless you have read that book, so I thought I should better do so. Having gone in the course of two books by Robert Irwin from thinking he was the bee's knees to thinking he needed a good talking to, I approached Orientalism with a feeling not of antipathy but rather of complete good will. And for about 30 pages, I enjoyed it, but boy, how it goes on. The central argument of Orientalism - that the West has tended to castigate the East as a mysterious 'other', strip it of its common humanity and impose upon it racial stereotypes - is entirely correct.
Indeed it could be considerably expanded not just from the domain of Arabic studies (which is mainly what Said writes about) but to many aspects of the West's interaction with the countries of Asia - China, Japan, India for example - and indeed many other parts of the world besides. But the whole argument requires at most 50 pages. Somehow or other, Said (pictured right) manages to string it out in one torturously boring, pompous and verbose page after another over some 300-odd pages. The most extraordinary thing is that this book has been translated into over 30 languages. How I pity the poor translators.

Anyway my belated conclusion on the whole Orientalism debate is that it's the academic equivalent of the Iran-Iraq war. What on earth are these guys all fighting about? All I can say is this: Robert Irwin would have been a lot better off devoting his energies to producing a readable guide to modern Arabic literature - something which is desperately needed.

For myself, I've been happily munching my way through the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, plus the recent bestseller The Yacoubian Building. I also got rather distracted by reading various things on central Asia such as Justin Marozzi's entertaining book on Tamerlane and am currently reading William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal.

But it's a bit of a literary war on various fronts. I've been dipping my toes into Hungarian literature by reading Len Rix's excellent translation of Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight (Len Rix is incidentally an erstwhile English teacher of mine) and my breakfast reading is the monumental and magnificent A Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil.


And switching continent yet again, I've also very much enjoyed getting to grips with a bit of Brazilian literature in the form of the classic Dom Casmurro by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (pictured left). In fact this book was the inaugural read of a book group I recently formed here in England and with whom I am hoping to tackle a variety of world classics.

There's quite a few things I've been meaning to catch up with on the blogging front however - in English and Japanese. So to make up for months of indolence, I'm hereby committing myself to a fortnightly blog in one language or another. Let's see how far I get...

Sunday 20 January 2008

Of Bolsheviks and Orientalists


And a belated happy new year to you all, dear blogsters...

I've been kept slightly off the blogging scene for a while due to a variety of international peregrinations. After a couple of weeks in Japan, I was in North Africa over the New Year and upon my return to the UK fell victim to the dreaded Man Flu from which I have only just recovered.

First things first however. For those of you interested in matters Sosekian, quite a few reviews and articles about the new book have now appeared in the Japanese press and I will be posting links to these on the 'articles' page of the Japanese side of this site. There were articles in all five national daily newspapers as well as numerous regional newspapers and I've also been interested to read comments about the book on many blog sites and to receive personal emails from readers. (One kind reader went so far as to invite me out for dinner at a Japanese bistro with two of his friends when I was last in Osaka which made for a magical evening.)

While working hard to promote the new book on Soseki, I've been leading a slightly schizophrenic existence as I'm currently doing research on Arabic literature - of which more in a moment.

For Christmas, my girlfriend very kindly gave me a wrapped-up copy of a library book with a gift tag marked 'This is a loaner!' on it. The book was Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin and although she also gave me a variety of other (thankfully non-loaner) gifts, this was by far her best pick. I commenced reading it on Boxing Day morning and found it entirely gripping and unputdownable.

Stalin must be one of the ten most important people of the last century and yet I knew virtually nothing about what kind of person he was or how he emerged to take hold of the Soviet Empire with such an iron grip. Stalin's early career as an ex-trainee priest turned communist ideologue, gangster and relentless womanizer, who was repeatedly imprisoned and exiled, is such a fascinating story that it seems incredible that it is only now - well over fifty years after Stalin's death - that it is finally coming to light.


When I was a teenager I had a considerable interest in Marxism, the Bolsheviks and the radical socialists of the early twentieth century and in my youthful folly even fancied myself a great revolutionary in the making. And yet there seemed to be an iron curtain of cold unknowable remoteness about Lenin and Stalin. The victors in the Russian Revolution had done their best to cover up their human foibles and promote an aura of godlike authority. I was drawn instead towards the bungling, all-too-human history of German socialism and when I was about fifteen I was completely fascinated by such characters as Karl Kautsky, Karl Liebknecht (pictured above right) and Rosa Luxemburg.

Of the many revelations in Montefiore's book, here are just a couple. Firstly it is startling to discover that one of the chief sources of funding for the Bolsheviks in the early twentieth century were oil magnates like the Rothschilds and Nobels. Why would such embodiments of the capitalist establishment fund an organization that was so completely counter to its interests - that would indeed ultimately seize all their assets in Russia? Part of the answer was a desire to pay a kind of protection game with the Bolsheviks to prevent acts of terrorism against them; another was a sneaking sympathy with some of the Bolshevik aims and indignation with Russia's ruling class.

Then there is the question of how it was that such a dangerous character like Stalin, the mastermind behind so much murder, extortion and robbery, who was constantly monitored by the Okhrana (the Tsarist secret police) and sent to prison and Siberian exile on countless occasions, could yet live to oversee the annihilation of the entire Tsarist order. It seems extraordinary that the system of Siberian exile should have been treated as a kind of amiable reading retreat from which radicals could easily escape. The entire system of exile is described by Montefiore as a 'sieve'.

So entertained was I by this account of Stalin's early life that I decided to sacrifice some of my precious restricted baggage weight towards this hefty hardback when I set off to Tunisia. My girlfriend and I did the usual tourist thing and stayed at a hotel brimming with British holidaymakers in Sousse and then took in all the classic sights (Tunis, the Roman amphitheatre at El Djem, the caves at Matmata etc). Here is a picture of me looking suitably frozen outside a pretty doorway in Sidi Bou Said.



I had always imagined Tunisia to be a kind of tamer version of Morocco with a heavy exposure to some of the more unfortunate aspects of the tourist scene - and so it proved. A lot of people of a certain age who used to encamp themselves in British seaside hotels for the winter now seem to be ensconced in the super-cheap hotels of Tunisia. Seeing the busloads of tourists on the two-day production-line 'Sahara Explorer' trips, dressing up in local garb and doing one hour trips on camels, made me think less of Lawrence of Arabia and more of donkeys on the beach at Blackpool.

Anyway there are still many pleasures to be had. The Roman mosaics at the Bardo Museum in Tunis were a highlight. Pictured below is a marble carved section of the palace that houses the collection.



Midway through my Tunisian travels I finished Young Stalin and swapped to the more appropriate Meadows of Gold by Masudi and The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature by Robert Irwin, a very entertaining and informative book. Thanks to the latter, I have learnt a great deal about some fascinating Arabic writers and some extraordinary lives and deaths. I certainly never knew for example that so many Arabic poems were about the pleasures of drinking alcohol or that there is such a strong tradition of satire and comedy in Arabic letters.

I particularly enjoyed the story of the poet Jahiz who so loved to read that he would pay bookshops to allow him to spend the night perusing their volumes and eventually died when a pile of books landed on him; or the quips by the poets that the only reason some people went on pilgrimage to Mecca was to check out the faces of the beautiful women not required to wear a veil en route.

The author of this book, Robert Irwin, sounds like an interesting character. The blurb tells us that as well as having taught Arabic and Middle Eastern history at various universities, he has published various books on Arabic history and art, as well as six novels of which the last was called Satan Wants Me. We are also told that he is the director of a publishing company. I note however that this anthology was first published under the title Nights and Horses and the Desert. If this was his choice of title, then I can only conclude that he is a much better writer than he is publishing director...

An internet search reveals that Irwin has also recently written a rebuttal of Edward Said's Orientalism called For Lust of Knowing. Although 'orientalism' seems to refer to the Western perception of the Islamic world, this does connect to the way in which the cultures of central and east Asia are also perceived in the West.

For example I studied Japanese at university within the confines of an absurdly named 'Oriental Studies Faculty' with Japanese, Chinese and Korean packed in alongside classes for Egyptology, Sanskrit, Aramaic and Hindi. In fact my director of studies was an expert in Sanskrit who paced around the faculty in sandals and wore an all-seeing-eye medallion on his hairy chest. What exactly had learning about modern Japanese society got to do with Sanskrit, Hebrew and Egyptian hieroglyphics apart from the fact that they were all perceived as 'oriental' in the eyes of the west?

I've never read Edward Said's book, but if it is this type of thing he is criticizing then it's hard not to agree that such attitudes towards non-western cultures are appallingly arrogant and demeaning.

On the other hand however - and here again I'm guessing the thrust of Irwin's rebuttal before actually reading it which is always dangerous - the great 'orientalists' were surely not puppets of any imperialist establishment, but rather counter culture figures who genuinely wished to explore little known cultures and explain their riches to the west. It was their love of obscure, ignored and unknown cultures that formed a common bond between them and eventually led to interests in completely different cultures being lumped together under the catch-all title 'oriental studies'.

Apparently after Said's book came out, 'orientalism' became something of a dirty word in the world of Arabic and Islamic studies. Yet, from another point of you, being an 'orientalist' - someone who is permanently trying to escape the narrow confines of western culture and explore new worlds - is surely a very fine thing to be. Indeed I'm beginning to realise that delving into Arabic literature is perhaps for me not so much a quantum leap as an extension of my own 'orientalist' interests.

I like to think of us Orientalists as the Bolsheviks of the Artistic world: few in number, lurking on the margins, permanently plotting the overthrow of the cultural establishment. Brothers and sisters, let us unite! Come the worldwide literary revolution and it'll be us, the orientalists, who will be running the planet!