Palestine av Joe Sacco

I'm blinking fast, snapping mental pictures and thinking, "This'll make a great couple of pages in the comic" - a weird scene of a pitching car with the rain going torrential while Sameh strains to see over his shoulder into the dark and fumbles with the gears to back us out of another washed-out path... and that's me next to him and this is my happiest moment... I've made it, you understand, I've come hundereds of miles via planes and buses and taxis to be precisely here: Jabalia, the must-see refugee camp of the Gaza Strip, the intifada's ground zero, a Disneyland of refuse and squalor... and here I am, brushing up against the Palestinian experience, a goddamn adventure cartoonist who hasn't changed his clothes in days, who's stepped over a few dead rats and shivered from the cold, who's bullshitted with the boys and nodded knowlingly at their horrible narratives... and I'm pinching myself in a car in the dark in a flood, giddy from the ferocity outside, thinking, "Throw it at me, baby, I can take it," but I've got the window rolled up tight...

Joe Sacco håller visst just nu på med en bok om Rafah. Han gjorde serierna om Palestina efter berättelser han samlat in och egna upplevelser från besök han gjorde i olika flyktingläger 1991-92. Palestine slutar med att hans buss, på väg till Egypten kört vilse, backar ut ur just Rafah av rädsla för palestinska småkillar och i stället stannar vid en gränspost och frågar israelisk militär om vägen.

Rafah juli 2005 http://www.flickr.com/photos/rafah/


__________________
Joe Sacco

Palestine. 1991-92. Fantagraphics Books, 2001: ISBN 1-56097-432-X
----------------

Några rader om The Fixer här på Böckerna.

Complecancy Kills Joe Sacco i Irak över en helg (tar ett tag att ladda in men värt det). Från Guardian: sacco1.pdf

Never Let Me Go av Kazuo Ishiguro

Kathy H. minns och berättar om uppväxten på internatet Hailsham, flytten till the Cottages och vad som sen blev. Never Let Me Go handlar om tre vänner, Kathy, Ruth och Tommy, som försöker hitta meningen med att göra något, älska, skapa, fantisera, lära sig saker.

Frågorna om meningen med deras liv är ställda på sina spetsar. Hailsham finns för förvaring men också för att trots allt ge barnen en barndom. Barnen har inga föräldrar och kan inte bli föräldrar. Dom finns för att donera sina organ till 'vanliga' människor. Innan dom blir donatorer ska dom ta hand om andra donatorer, vara carers.

Vartefter Kathy, Ruth och Tommy blir äldre klokare och förstår varför dom finns, försöker dom göra det något meningsfullt med det liv dom har. Och det gör dom genom att vara duktiga. Duktiga på att vara barn, studenter, carers, donatorer.

Ett rykte cirkulerar på Hailsham. Det handlar om att man kan få extra tid till liv om ett par kan bevisa att dom är kära i varandra. Kärleken som ska övervinna döden.

Läs mer om Never Let Me Go under länkarna nedan och missa inte intervjun i The Agony Column.

Första kapitlet Never Let Me Go av Kazuo Ishiguro
__________________
Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go. 2005. A.A Knopf: ISBN 1-4000-4339-5
The Ramains of the Day. 1989.

----------
if only...
Intervju med Kazuo Ishiguro i The Agony Column. (40 min. Från 25/4 2005. Mp3.)

'When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it. All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.' 'For me, England is a mythical place' Intervju i Guardian.

This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been. Recension i Guardian.

Never Let Me Go is unlikely to be everybody's cup of tea. The people in it aren't heroic. The ending is not comforting. Nevertheless, this is a brilliantly executed book by a master craftsman who has chosen a difficult subject: ourselves, seen through a glass, darkly.
Brave New World - Kazuo Ishiguro's novel really is chilling. Margaret Atwood om Never Let Me Go i Slate.

------------------

AURANS BAKGRUND
Jag beställde boken i en amerikansk utgåva och blev nyfiken på det förbryllande mystifika omslagsfotot. Fotot heter Christina och är taget av en engelsk flygpionjär, Lietenant Colonel Mervyn O'Gorman, på 10-talet. Han plåtade för att prova färgfotografering med autokromteknik. Han lät motiven bära rött för att testa autokromens möjligheter.


Christina at Durdle Door, Dorset, 1912.
Foto: Lietenant Colonel Mervyn O'Gorman


20060328
Guardian Book Club lusläser Never Let Me Go:
* Future imperfect

Kazuo Ishiguro on how a radio discussion helped fill in the missing pieces of Never Let Me Go

Throughout the 1990s I kept writing pieces of a story about an unusual group of "students" in the English countryside. I was never quite clear who these people were. They lived in wrecked farmhouses, and though they did a few typically student-like things - argued over books, worked on the occasional essay, fell in and out of love - there was no campus or professor in sight. Some strange fate hung over these young people, but again, I didn't know precisely what it was. (In those days, my mind kept turning to nuclear weapons.)

* A life half lived

The restrictions Kazuo Ishiguro places on the language of his narrator mirror the seclusion of her artificial life, says John Mullan

The narrative is marked by her attempts to get her story straight. The signs of her awkwardness - "I should explain", "I'll first have to give you the background" - are artfully threaded into the narrative. Trying to remember things is all that you can do. "Maybe I'm remembering it wrong"; "What I do remember is"; "I'm not sure". A narrator who has no past beyond herself - no family history - has a special need to recollect.

Motherless Brooklyn av Jonathan Lethem

Lionel Essrog är en av de fyra föräldralösa ungar som hamnat under Frank Minnas beskydd. Det är Tony som tror sig vara italienare, Steve Grossman stor mage liten hjärna, basketkillen Danny Fantl och runkaren Gilbert och så Lionel, a Free Human Freakshow, med Tourettes syndrom. Motherless Brooklyn.

Minna's Court Street was the Old Brooklyn, a placid ageless surface alive underneath with talk, with deals and casual insults, a neighborhood political machine with pizzeria and butcher-shop bosses and unwritten rules everywhere. All was talk except for what mattered most, which were unspoken understandings.

Pojkarna får kostymer, tror sig först vara flyttfirma och limousinservice, sen detektiver och kallar sig Minna Men. Någon sticker en kniv i Minna och Lionel ger sig ut, som den deckare han är, för att hitta mördaren.

Minna Men wear suits. Minna Men drive cars. Minna Men listen to tapped lines. Minna Men stand behind Minna, hands in their pockets, looking menacing. Minna Men carry money. Minna Men collect money. Minna Men don't ask questions. Minna Men answer phones. Minna Men pick up packages. Minna Men are clean-shaven. Minna Men follow instructions. Minna Men try to be like Minna, but Minna is dead.

Tell your story walking.
__________________
Jonathan Lethem

Motherless Brooklyn. 1999. Vintage contemporaries, 2000. Pocket: ISBN 0-375-72483-4
The Fortress of Solitude 2005

________________

> Jonatham Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn Read by Steve Buscemi
> (mp3 excerpt i Salon)

...............
Wheels within wheels was another of Minna's phrases, used exclusively to sneer at our notions of coincidence or conspiracy. If we Boys ever dabbled in astonishment at, say, his running into three girls he knew from high school in a row on Court Street, two of whom he'd dated behind each other's backs, he'd bug his eyes and intone: wheels within wheels. No Met had ever pitched a no-hitter, but Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan both pitched them after being traded away--wheels within wheels. The barber, the cheese man and the bookie were all named Carmine--oh yeah, wheels within wheels, bigtime. You're onto something there, Sherlock.
Utdrag ur Motherless Brooklyn


"Frank, what happened?"

"Knife," said Minna. "No biggie."

"You're gonna be all right?" Coney was asking and willing it at once.

"Oh, yeah. Great."

"Sorry, Frank."

"Who?" I said. "Who did this?"

Minna smiled. "You know what I want out of you, Freakshow? Tell me a joke. You got one you been saving, you must."
Utdrag ur Motherless Brooklyn.

Lethem harnesses the engine of a familiar genre to transport us to a territory uniquely his own. It comes as no surprise that he uses Tourette's as an excuse for some heady verbal pyrotechnics. (My favorite Essrog riff: "He's just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse.") More unexpected is the sympathetic warmth he brings to the characterization of Lionel. "Motherless Brooklyn" has a few problems -- including some cartoonlike stock characters and one scene near the end that flirts with maudlin sentimentality -- but it works far better than the average hip postmodern novel in terms of sheer emotional impact. "Motherless Brooklyn". Salon Reviews


In other words: once there were giants, with magical powers, secret identities, Technicolored underwear, and swishy capes. Male adulthood proved to be much less fun than the masked dreams of pop culture had led little boys to believe. Growing up stunted us. The primary emotions and psychic wounds of the Marvel superhero are as drums and trumpets to the disappointed marimba tinkle and sneezy regrets of the fortysomething salaryman. "Perhaps," says Lethem, "superheroism was a sort of toxin, like a steroid, one with a punitive cost to the body" ?but we can't help feeling that, for him, we traded in the experience of living large (James Dean, Godzilla) for the poignant (a wild pitch, a broken shoe lace) and the ignoble (cowardice, envy: "Bite my crank, Super Goat Man!"?the taunt of two college boys trying to provoke the aging comic book hero to use his superpowers as he climbs a clock tower toward them and the giant paper clip they wave down at him as if it were an "enormous phallus").Welcome to New Dork. Artikel om Jonathan Lethem appropå The Fortress of Solitude. John Leonard i New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005

Gaza Blues av Samir El-youssef och Etgar Keret

Hamlet, you noble soul
Glory to your name
But, if you had been living in this country
You would have become a bastard,
A revolutionary pimp,
Or a fucker of a freedom fighter!

Poemet är Bassems i The Day the Beast Got Thirsty, Samir El-youssefs del i Gaza Blues.

Bassem finns i ett palestinskt flyktingläger i Libanon. Han ger en resebyråman en sedelbunt för ett visum till Tyskland som han förstår att han inte ska få ändå. Han borde leta efter sin kompis. Han glömmer bort att gå och se om han har fått sitt Tysklands-visum. Bassem säger hej hejdå till personer han aldrig kommit ihåg att komma ihåg och säger jo jag är verkligen intresserad av att läsa din bok, ungefär på samma sätt som resebyråmannen sagt att han ska på hedersord ordna det där visumet. Bassems namn måste man säga minst två gånger innan Bassem lyssnar.

sometimes I did not know where I was going to, nor coming from, nor whether, in the first place, I was going or coming.

Han har fantasier om att skjuta sina grannar och sen dricka kaffe. Han knarkar och ska skriva kurdistanska nyhetsbrev (som han skiter i). Bassem vill inte slåss, Bassem vill fly. I stället för att locka hem sin försvunna kamrat med tjejen som ser ut som en apa men som kamraten är kär i så nyper Bassem henne.

I got close to her, and pinched her. She laughed and pinched me. I slapped har bare arm, and she slapped mine. I bit her neck and she bit mine, and soon we were lying on the carpeted floor, her head on my shoulder.

Yes, I thought to myself, we must get married, Dalal and I. We will get married, and have ten children but then they will die, and have their photos as huge posters glued to the walls of the Camp, declaring them as heroic martyrs who have died while fighting the Zionist enemy. And Dalal and I would be the proud parents of ten martyrs. After that Israel could invade Lebanon again, destroy the Camp and fuck us all up, so we die and get the hell out of this fucking life.

Bassem gråter när han förstår att resebyråmannen lurat honom och sen blir han glad för att han hade rätt om resebyråmannen.

Etgar Keret har skrivit en rad korta berättelser, om kvinnan som limmar sig själv till taket, en snubbe som beställer meningen med livet för 9.99 med frakt, sonen till chefen för Mossad som inte vet att han är sonen till chefen för Mossad, adidas-skorna som pojken inte vill bära för att dom är gjorda i Tyskland.

Efter varje bombattentat i Israel så ska offren obduceras, trots att det väl sällan kan råda något direkt tvivel om dödsorsaken. En av berättelserna, Surprise Egg, handlar om en obducent som upptäcker att en ung kvinna varit full av cancer. Ska han berätta det för hennes man? Ska han lindra smärtan genom att säga hon skulle dött snart ändå och

On the other hand, this new could make the grief even more distressing and turn her arbitrary and horrible death inte something much more horrible: a death experienced twice over in a sens, making it inevitable, as if someone up there wantetd to make absolutuely sure, and no "what ifs" could have saved her, not even hypothetically.

Mannen identifierar sin fru genom att titta på hennes fot. Obducenten berättar inte om cancern för mannen.

"If only she hadn't gone to work that day", he thought, forcing himself to get up, "if only I'd driven her. She'd still be alive now, sitting here in the kitchen with me."
__________________
Samir El-youssef och Etgar Keret

Gaza Blues. 2004. David Paul, London: ISBN 0-9540542-4-5

Throughout, Youssef masters a sort of winding, coiling and expanding stoned logic that makes the novella a hysterical read, often with creeping meaning. At one point Bassem is told that the Kurdish cause is the twin sister of the Palestinian cause. From this, he decides the French Revolution must be the older sister and the Iranian revolution the younger sister. "Then I thought that our Revolution had too many siblings," writes Youssef. "What madness."
Artikel som fick mig att beställa boken.

These two new voices from Israel and Palestine have no common political agenda (they don't talk about politics to each other), but share a stated desire to make the conflict more complex for their readers. Complex as human life is complex: maddening, contradictory, filled with conflicting emotions, weaknesses, dreams, failings. For those who have not travelled to this region, your only recourse is literature, which addresses why the conflict is so intractable and why the dehumanisation of the enemy through slogans makes the desired resolution so impossible. The wit, daring, and sheer bloody-minded audacity of these marvellous stories makes it, for me, the book of the year for anyone who prefers to listen to the voices of the people of this region instead of the sound of their own rhetoric.
Recension av Linda Grant i Guardian