Salman Rushie, um bom escritor

From The Times

June 19, 2007

Muslim world inflamed by Rushdie knighthood

Ben Hoyle

Sir Salman Rushdie celebrates his 60th birthday today in familiar circumstances: he is once again the subject of death threats across the Islamic world.

Eighteen years after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill him, a government minister in Pakistan said yesterday that Rushdie’s recent knighthood justified suicide bombing.

The question of blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s 1988 tale of a prophet misled by the devil, remains a deeply sensitive issue in much of the Muslim world and the author’s inclusion in the Queen’s Birthday Honours last week has inflamed anti-British sentiment.

Gerald Butt, editor of the authoritative Middle East Economic Survey, told The Times: “It will be interpreted as an action calculated to goad Muslims at a time when the atmosphere is already very tense and Britain’s standing in the region is very low because of its involvement in Iraq and its lack of action in tackling the Palestine issue.”

Hardliners in Iran revived calls for his murder yesterday. Mehdi Kuchakzadeh, a Tehran MP, declared: “Rushdie died the moment the late Imam [Ayatollah Khomeini] issued the fatwa.”

The Organisation to Commemorate Martyrs of the Muslim World, a fringe hardline group, offered a reward of $150,000 (£75,000) to any successful assassin.

Forouz Rajaefar, the group’s secretary general, said: “The British and the supporters of the anti-Islam Salman Rushdie could rest assured that the writer’s nightmare will not end until the moment of his death and we will bestow kisses on the hands of whomsoever is able to execute this apostate.”

Effigies of Rushdie and the Queen were burnt in Pakistan, where presidential elections at the end of the year have destablised an already volatile political climate. Hundreds of protesters in Multan, Karachi and Lahore set fire to British flags and chanted “Death to Britain, death to Rushdie” and Islamist leaders called for nationwide protests after Friday prayers.

Ijaz-ul-Haq, the Religious Affairs Minister, told the assembly in Islamabad that the award of the knighthood excused suicide bombing. “If somebody has to attack by strapping bombs to his body to protect the honour of the Prophet then it is justified,” he said.

He later retracted his statement, explaining that he had intended to say that knighting Rushdie will foster extremism. “If someone blows himself up, he will consider himself justified. How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West? We demand an apology by the British government. Their action has hurt the sentiments of 1.5 billion Muslims."

Pakistan’s national assembly earlier unanimously passed a resolution condemning Rushdie’s knighthood, which it said would encourage “contempt” for the Prophet Muhammad.

Rushdie was forced to go into hiding for almost a decade after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the death sentence over The Satanic Verses.

On Valentine’s Day in 1989 the spiritual figurehead of the Iranian revolution pronounced on Teheran radio that: “The author of The Satanic Verses, which is against Islam, the Prophet, the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.”

In Britain, the subsequent hate campaign helped to politicise and radicalise a generation of young British Muslims. The taxpayer is believed to have spent more than £10 million protecting Rushdie.

Only Khomeini had the power officially to lift the fatwa and he died without doing so, but in 1998, the Iranian Foreign Minister promised his British counterpart, Robin Cook, that Iran would not implement it.

Gradually, Rushdie emerged back into the literary spotlight and in recent years has appeared at events in London and New York, where he now lives.

It is understood that when he is in this country, Rushdie continues to receive round-the-clock police protection.

Muhammad Ali Hosseini, Iran’s foreign affairs spokesman, said on Sunday that the knighthood “will definitely put the British officials in confrontation with Islamic societies. This act shows that insulting Islamic sacred values is not accidental. It is planned, organised, guided and supported by some Western countries.”

O maior (em $) prêmio literário do mundo

Biggest literary prize goes to little-known Norwegian
Michelle Pauli
Thursday June 14, 2007

Guardian Unlimited

A writer little known beyond Norway has beaten many of the biggest international names to the world's richest book prize. Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses takes the 100,000-euro purse for the Impac Dublin award for what the judges called "a poignant and moving tale of a changing perspective on the world ... and of nostalgia for a simpler way of life."

The melancholy tale, translated by Anne Born, follows a 67-year-old man who is forced to remember the traumatic events of his childhood. His life was changed forever in the summer of 1948, when he was only 15. Through his memories the novel brings that distant summer to life and explores how the recovered past disturbs the present.

Petterson said that he was happy and surprised to have won the Impac. "It seems with this book I am the boy with the golden trousers and every time I put my hand in my pockets I pick up a golden coin," he said. "It is so cool."

Anne Born's English translation was published in November 2005 to great critical acclaim, and the author and translator won the £10,000 Independent foreign fiction prize with the book last year. However, the book has yet to reach the wider audience enjoyed by the bestselling original in Petterson's home country, where it also won the booksellers' award.

Nonetheless, it beat a shortlist of big-hitters to the Impac, fending off competition from the South African Nobel laureate JM Coetzee with Slow Man, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, Julian Barnes's Arthur and George and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

According to the Lebanese novelist and judge Hanan al-Shaykh, the winning novel "had everything".

The Irish poet and judge Gerald Dawe agreed. It "pipped past the post" of the strong shortlist, he said, because it is "a wonderfully subtle book. In the background, shadowing it with an almost ghostly narrative, there is the history of how war impacts on families in very different ways."

While Petterson has namechecked Norway's 1920 Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun as a particular inspiration for the novel, the subtlety of Out Stealing Horses, with its focus on character and relationships rather than plot owes much to the influence of the American writer Raymond Carver. As well as a number of other novels Petterson has also published a collection of short stories.

The Impac stands out from the crowd of literary prizes not just for its purse, its notoriously massive longlist (this year's was 138-srong) and its international scope (nominations for the longlist came from 169 libraries from 129 cities in 49 countries), but also for its long lead-time. Books first published in English between January and December 2005, or first published in a language other than English between January 2001 and December 2005, are eligible for consideration. This means titles that have already done the rounds of literary prizes have a final chance, and books that may have drifted from public consciousness are granted a second wave of publicity.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Jewish mothers

"In You Never Call, You Never Write, Joyce Antler provides an illuminating and often amusing history of one of the best-known figures in popular culture--the Jewish Mother. Whether drawn as self-sacrificing or manipulative, in countless films, novels, radio and television programs, stand-up comedy, and psychological and historical studies, she appears as a colossal figure, intensely involved in the lives of her children."