The Maris Review, vol 42
On that one time I saw Donna Tartt wearing a killer pantsuit
What I read this week
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Here is the book on the war in Gaza that I've been waiting for. Omar El Akkad's nonfiction debut (I was a big fan of American War) is a short and tight and pointed piece of writing, stylish but not too stylish, with a moral clarity at its center that cuts through like a laser. Westerners, he says, like to think of ourselves as the good guys, the underdogs, the protagonists in the great big story of the world. But there is so much we have to ignore in order to believe it.
In an appeal to common sense and rationality El Akkad lays bare the mental gymnastics one has to do to be a good liberal in America, the excess of rationalizing one must do to see some violence as "necessary," to view the decimation of a people and a place as "complicated."
"It is instead the middle, the liberal, the well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say : Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism."
In telling his personal story of his experiences as a Western reporter covering much of the news coming out of places so many of us don't like to think about (Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, etc) El Akkad reminds us that journalist-as- neutral-observer is a myth. Bothsidesing works when both sides are playing fair, and when was that ever true?
I highly recommend this book and am so grateful it will be out in the world next week.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
I listened to Jeremy Irons, star of the 1981 British miniseries, narrate the audiobook version of Evelyn Waugh's classic, and if you're on the fence this is the way to do it. I am usually not a fan of narrators who do a variety of different voices for different characters. Such performances have a way of being reductive in their characterizations, with the lady character speaking in a high pitched whine, or the lower class character sounding like an idiot. But of course, Irons is one of our best actors so he's up to the task, and it also helps his cause that the cast of characters of Waugh's 1945 novel is not at all diverse, with very few foreign accents required. He is all wit, all scintillatingly silly dialog and discarded childhood teddy bears and existential angst.
I had read Brideshead ages ago, but it was Lili Anolik's 2021 podcast about Bennington that made me extra interested in the audiobook. The podcast describes how Donna Tartt and her circle of college classics majors were obsessed with the Irons-led Brideshead miniseries, dressing up in excellently tailored menswear to play act as 1920s dandies in the early 198os. Whether or not such an understanding should change one's reading of The Secret History remains unclear, but the one time I saw Tartt in person (at a marathon reading of A Christmas Carol at Housing Works Bookstore approx 10 years ago) she was wearing a killer pants suit and so therefore it feels relevant.
ICYMI I contributed to the blurbs discourse, but with a fun twist at the end
What are the execs who want to focus the conversation around blurbs trying to distract you from?
I put on my tinfoil hat here at Lit Hub.
New releases, 2/18
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser
The Echoes by Evie Wyld
Daughters of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood's First Stuntwoman by Mallory O'Meara
How To Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art by Morgan Falconer
Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass by Sarah Jones
No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce by Haley Mlotek
Dream State by Eric Puchner
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts
