Author: gcaw

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Atlantic Monthly

The Battle in Tahrir Square

Originally appeared in The Atlantic.

CAIRO, Egypt — The Egyptian protest started getting violent early this afternoon, a few minutes after a cheerful girl, about 14 years old, handed me a caramel. Since I arrived yesterday afternoon, and up until the caramel reached my hand, Tahrir Square was a calm place lacking any menace whatsoever. Children were having their faces painted. Men and women were happily sweeping up trash, helping each other pitch tents, and waiting patiently for their turn at the water tap. It reminded me of Burning Man, except that in the place of stations for full-body nude massages or refills of psychedelics, it had little protest areas where one could find Muslim Brothers, students, and every other flavor of disaffected Egyptian.

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Bookforum

Liberty Abroad

El sueño del celta.
By Mario Vargas Llosa
Madrid: Alfaguara. 464 pages. $20.

Originally appeared in Bookforum.

Those who wish to see politics in everything frequently get their wish. The selection of a Nobel laureate in literature is a case in point. In 2001, the choice of V. S. Naipaul looked to some like a post-9/11 gesture of sympathy with America—even an endorsement of America’s incipient military rebukes to Islamism. Four years later, awarding the anti-American Harold Pinter looked like a rebuke to the American rebuke. And last year’s selection, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, looks like the most overtly political winner in the past three decades.

The attention garnered by other laureates for their politics has been, by and large, a byproduct of their writing. This is true of Pinter as well as of Gabriel García Márquez (a “courtesan of Castro,” Vargas Llosa once called him). But for Vargas Llosa, politics is his métier, and his best work, both fiction and nonfiction, is political to the core. As a result of his failed 1990 campaign for the Peruvian presidency and five decades of political journalism, we know that he espouses Thatcherite classical liberalism with a Latin American face. (Much of Vargas Llosa’s journalism remains unavailable in English; to confuse matters further, his collected early political writing, Contra viento y marea [Against the Wind and Tide], happens to share a title with the Spanish edition of the autobiography of the conservative Walker, Texas Ranger star Chuck Norris.) Now, with the release in Spanish of his seventeenth novel, El sueño del celta (The Dream of the Celt), Vargas Llosa’s political reputation is due for a reappraisal.

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National

The Kidnapping of Ajmal Khan

Originally appeared in The National.

The last known person to see Ajmal Khan, the vice-chancellor of Islamia College University, was a newspaper hawker a block away from Khan’s home. The scene the man witnessed was a familiar one in Peshawar. Around nine in the morning on September 7, 2010, Khan left his house in a late-model Toyota. His driveway’s iron gates, decorated with ornamental metal grape-leaves, had barely closed when a white car cut him off. The hawker watched as assailants commandeered the car, shoved the chauffeur aside and sandwiched Khan between them in the back seat before driving off. The hawker then walked to the Khan’s gate, knocked, and informed the family: “Ajmal Khan has been kidnapped.”

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Wall Street Journal

The Last Lingua Franca

I review Nicholas Ostler’s The Last Lingua Franca in The Wall Street Journal.

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Caravan

Temporary Autonomous Zone

Originally appeared in Caravan.

IN 2003, Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, felt like a city preparing for a siege. Its residents, nearly all Kurds, were proud of having built a poor but functioning Kurdish homeland. But on Iraq’s northern border, the Turkish military stood ready for Ankara to order an invasion.To the south, across the imaginary line that separated Kurdish Iraq from Arab Iraq, violencewas simmering, and Erbil’s residents were steeling themselves for the moment when it would spill over their own borders. In the centre of the city, the magnificent citadel— round, brown and layered, very much like Bruegel’s ‘Tower of Babel’—looked ready to repulse a medieval invasion, as if the city’s Kurdish majority could crowd in, pull up the ladders, and watch the waves of Arabic- and Turkish-speakers wash away the Kurdish dream.

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Wall Street Journal

On the incompetence of the ANC

Originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

By R.W. Johnson
(Overlook, 702 pages, $40)

Trevor Manuel, the South African finance minister from 1996 to 2009, got his job when the aging Nelson Mandela asked, at a cabinet meeting, who was a good economist. Mr. Manuel raised his hand thinking Mr. Mandela had asked who was “a good communist.” Mr. Manuel served his country ably. But the appointment of the sole competent minister in the first government of African National Congress was a matter of blind luck.

This will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who has followed R.W. Johnson’s reporting. The South Africa correspondent for the (London) Sunday Times and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, Mr. Johnson has been a prolific critic of the ANC’s 16-year tenure in power. “South Africa’s Brave New World,” his political history of the post- apartheid era, amounts to a book-length indictment of the ANC. Its leaders come through as so corrupt, lecherous and violent that governance is not even an afterthought. “If we didn’t dine with thugs and crooks,” says one to Mr. Johnson, “then we’d always eat alone.” The book is a catalog of sins and rumors (footnoted, though often attributed to private sources or, for example, “old girlfriends” of ANC members). It is big and disorganized but filled with credible gossip—like the Trevor Manuel story—and therefore a delight.

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National

Ice Kingdom

Originally appeared in  The National.

Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia

Toby Craig Jones

Harvard University Press

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Researchers recently announced that what was thought to be the most arid place known to man might actually be wet enough to support life. Just one small truckload of its soil, they say, can support the drinking, cooking, and showering needs of a person for a day, as long as you are willing to spend the energy needed to wring the water out of the dirt that conceals it.

This surprisingly wet place is, of course, the moon. Residents of the Arabian Peninsula are in some ways in a more precarious situation. There is not a single river or lake in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the factories that clean salt water consume massive amounts of energy, even though they are barely enough to meet the needs of the population. If these desalination plants were to shut down, Saudi Arabia would begin to die of thirst within days.

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Barnes & Noble Review

V. S. Naipaul in Africa

Originally appeared in The Barnes and Noble Review .

 

The Masque of Africa

By V. S. NAIPAUL
Reviewed by Graeme Wood

 

If you’re bothered by political incorrectness, discovering that V. S. Naipaul has written a travel book about Africa should have you ready to assume the brace position. It’s like finding out that Norman Mailer left behind an unpublished manuscript detailing his true views on women, or that the elderly Ezra Pound wrote an epic poem about Jewish bankers. According to his erstwhile protégé Paul Theroux, Naipaul once remarked that  “Africans need to be kicked” and said their continent is “obscene, fit only for second-rate people.” Anyone who has read his novels and travelogues knows that he despises illiteracy, violence, and above all the failure to bend the knee to literary genius. When Naipaul meets Africa, then, expect a train wreck.

 

Naipaul’s best and worst work has come from Africa. A Bend in the River, set in Zaire, is among the finest novels ever to emerge from the continent, but Half a Life, set partly in Mozambique, must rank among the most sluggish victory laps by a recent Nobel Laureate. His present book, The Masque of Africa, is Naipaul’s first travel writing since 1998’s Beyond Belief, and it takes on the question of African belief—the fundamental views of the world held by people he meets in Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Gabon, and South Africa. For Naipaul the Uganda portion marks a return: he lived and taught there in the 1960s, a catastrophic period portrayed memorably by Theroux in Sir Vidia’s Shadow. He seems to have mellowed considerably since then. Theroux’s Naipaul was called upon to judge a campus literary competition and announced that the entries were so bad that he would award only one prize, called Third Prize. Now Naipaul mostly refrains from insulting his hosts and even singles out one as having “merit” as a poet.

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