Among contemporary German authors, one stands out who for years has been able to operate in various forms of expression and does not fit into any category: Thomas Kapielski....
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L'Espresso | Al Ahram Weekly | Gazeta Wyborcza | The Guardian | Polityka | Folio | The New York Times Book Review | Weltwoche
L'Espresso, 11.08.2005 (Italy)
"Belgrade is a strange city," writes Andrzej Stasiuk, who went there for an event being held in the name of his famous colleague Danilo Kis.
"The gathering that was intended to honour one of the greatest Serbian
writers was being watched over by Serbian police. The participants feel
a bit like the members of a forbidden religion, meeting in the
catacombs. The audience is made up mainly of friends. On the walls are
photographs of graves full of corpses but the speakers talk of poetry,
metaphors and the phonetics of texts whose shared feature is the
narrative of paranoia and the perversion of power which is nourished by
death and massacres."
Al Ahram Weekly, 04.08.2005 (Egypt)
Amr Hamzawy explains that, due to a well-rehearsed duo, necessary reforms are going to proceed very slowly, if at all, in Saudi Arabia.
"The ruling elite monopolises the government and national revenue while
the Wahabi religious establishment controls schools and universities.
Their power is exercised and perpetuated within the framework of a
mutually beneficial relationship whereby the latter confers religious
legitimacy upon the ruling elite while the former protects the Wahabis' absolute authority
to regulate society. This reciprocal arrangement works to curb any
reformist drive, giving both sides of the equation the ability to
determine the nature and pace of political change. Against this binary
power structure the influence of other political forces in society,
from the liberal, secularist, enlightened Islamist to the hardline
fundamentalist, pales. Whatever hopes they entertain are pinned either
on manoeuvring themselves into positions whereby they can obtain the
ear of those who monopolise power, or else on mobilising the public in support of their demands, so enhancing their room for manoeuvre."
Gazeta Wyborcza, 06.08.2005 (Poland)
Miroslaw Czech and Jerzy Chmielewski engage in a debate on the situation in Belarus. In the last two weeks, several speakers representing the Polish minority in Belarus have been arrested.
Lukaschenko has accused them of being a raiding patrol of the EU, trying to instigate an orange revolution. Czech said
in an interview, "Warsaw must not be silent if the rights of the Polish
minority are being violated, but Lukashenko's regime can spin this as a
western intervention in the country's domestic politics. For this reason,
one must try to represent the problem as a violation of elementary
human rights and not as a bilateral conflict. We have to make it clear
to the Belorussians that this also has to do with their rights. To do
this, the representatives of the Polish minority and the Belorussians
in Poland should be brought together – solidarity of the minorities against the dictatorship!" Chmielewski, himself a representative of the Belorussian minority in Poland, warns,
"We regret the situation but we have little influence on it. Poland
should be more careful in its statements so that the Belorussians don't
get the feeling that they are being talked down to by their
western neighbours. I only hope that the present conflict does not
result in separation and animosity – we must get to know and understand
each other better."
The Guardian, 06.08.2005 (UK)
The writer Blake Morrison goes to bat
for editors – key figures in the world of literature who are
characterized as know-it-alls but whose existence is now seriously
threatened, as their work is increasingly regarded as superfluous.
Particularly in England, cutbacks have meant that publisher's in-house
editors are no longer able to supervise all their authors, meaning that
either freelancers are engaged or novels are published in their raw
form. "Perhaps I've been unusually lucky, but in my experience,
editors, far from coercing and squashing writers, do exactly
the opposite, elucidating them and drawing them out, or, when they're
exhausted and on the point of giving up (like marathon runners hitting
the wall), coaxing them to go the extra mile. And yet this myth of the
destructive editor - the dolt with the blue pencil - is
pervasive, not least in academe." Today it still pertains: "Those who
can, write; those who can't, edit - that seems to be the line. I prefer
TS Eliot. Asked if editors were no more than failed writers, he replied: 'Perhaps - but so are most writers.'"
Polityka, 03.08.2005 (Poland)
Adam Krzeminski writes on the 60th anniversary of the Potsdam Conference,
commenting that in contrast to the celebrations marking the end of
World War II on May 8-9, no country was making a big thing of the day.
No wonder: "Potsdam was a 'day of reckoning'. And one
of the judges was a criminal comparable to Hitler. Yes, the Allies
agreed to drastic solutions, like the massive 'transfer' of the German
populations living in Central and Eastern Europe, solutions which
complied with no existing intergovernmental arrangements. But these
were also exceptional times. You can't declare war on two
continents, wage it in the most criminal way, and then go home as if
you'd lost a football match. What should the Allies have done? Cut
Germany into little bits, turn it into one big potato patch,
require it to pay an additional ten billion dollars in reparations?"
But, Krzeminski insists, the Potsdam model must be declared an isolated
historical event, one that could not serve as an example.
Folio, 02.08.2005 (Switzerland)
The weekly magazine of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung is all about men. English ethnologist Nigel Barley takes a look at "new laddism".
"I called another friend, a psychologist, and asked him what he thought
about it. He sounded irritated. 'Baloney', he grumbled. 'Laddism is
nothing but a new name for egoistical retarded development. By
the way, did I tell you I'm getting a divorce and moving into a new
place? I've realised that in fact I don't really want children. I have
enough of them all day long at work. Where was I? Oh yeah, you're
barking up the wrong tree. The real problem of laddism doesn't lie with
men, but with women! Today they all act the same way, they go on
binges, eat fast food, burn the candle at both ends... Have you seen
how girls walk around these days? That says it all. I can't imagine any man letting it all hang out like that. It's nauseating."
In his Duftnote column on fragrances, Luca Turin
calls for great perfumes to be conserved for eternity. Current scent
museums do not deserve the name, he writes. "Most of them (one in Paris and several in Grasse) consist of collections of bottles
and end up in a shop. There the frustrated visitors who were not
allowed to smell a thing for half an hour are set loose among an
arsenal of multicoloured soaps they can take home and give to relatives
and other un-loved ones. The biggest museum in Grasse used to have a
glass wall behind which you could see a perfumer at work, just like a panda bear in a zoo. And just like a panda, the poor guy spent most of his time holed up in a back room."
The New York Times Book Review, 06.08.2005 (USA)
Rachel Donadio visits the "irascible prophet", writer V.S. Naipaul, at his home in Wiltshire. The author does full justice to his reputation, and rails against French authors like the "tedious" Proust
and the "infuriating" Stendhal with as much gusto as he denounces the
"philosophical shrieking" of Islamist holy warriors. And he announces
the end of both modernity and fiction: "'We've changed. The world has
changed. The world has grown bigger.' Which brings us back to
the limitations of the novel. The writer must leave the sitting room
and travel abroad into the active, busy world. It is the tragic vision only a novelist can reach: that the world cannot be contained in the novel." Listen to excerpts from the interview here.
Weltwoche, 08.08.2005 (Switzerland)
Urs Gehriger and Simon Brunner quote from blogs, homepages and Internet forums by American soldiers
stationed in Iraq. "We sat tight, my humvee was in flames. Everyone
else from my truck was wounded, and my machine gunner, Lance Corporal
Cisneros, was dead. He'd saved our lives when a rocket hit the roof of
the transporter and exploded downwards. He took the whole brunt of the
explosion and protected the rest of us." One amateur porno forum features a big archive
with films and images taken by soldiers while deployed. The key to its
success: anyone providing material from Iraq gets free access to the
pay-to-view pages.
RSS
The Hungarian magazines are thrilled to be able to read Herta Müller's "Everything I Own I Carry With Me". In the Blätter, Jürgen Habermas calls for an extension of human rights into the social sphere. In La regle du jeu, big name European intellectuals defend their Croatian colleague Predrag Matvejevitch, who faces imprisonment for describing an ultra-nationalist Croatian poet as the "Catholic Taliban". Slate wants to know whether Nabokov's poem "Pale Fire" was meant seriously or not. The TLS meets radical feminists with fabulous names - like the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre. Przekroj looks at the two types of Turkish cinema. And in the NYT, Jay Rosen explains why the Internet is eroding America's most beautiful ideal.
Mediapart decries the connivances of French politics and media. In the Nation, Colin Robinson picks a fight with Amazon. Osteuropa rolls out the red carpet for the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg. The London Review remembers the media feeding frenzy around Tolstoy's deathbed. In Opendemocracy, the poet Tatiana Shcherbina feels the evil creeping back into Russia.
The Swiss Magazin looks at the lawyers and doctors who are producing stewardesses and farmers. Caffe Europa shares Ulrich Beck's optimism about the religious mix of the future. The Boston Globe looks at the powerlessness of facts in the face of false convictions. In Le Monde, Michel Onfray trembles before the language of empire. The New Statesmen evaluates the new young supertaskers. The TLS reads a book about 19th anarchists. Outlook India and the NYT tackle terror in India, Pakistan and Yemen.
The New Yorker wonders which is better equipped to determine the authenticity of a Leonardo da Vinci: the connoisseur or the forensic scientist. Polityka picks through the remains of the Fourth Republic. In The Observer, Claire Denis talks about shame and humiliation. In La regle du jeu, Roberto Saviano does not like what he sees in the eyes of his admirers. MicroMega has witnessed the birth of a political monster: illiberal democracy. The London Review of Books is looking for aliens to take care of our nuclear waste.
The New Yorker profiles Saad Mohseni, Afghanistan's first media mogul. La vie des idees and the Guardian recommend Gilbert Achcar's book "The Arabs and the Holocaust". The children in Hungary are eating their revolution, fears Elet es Irodalom. Magyar Narancs and Rue89 fear for independence of the press. In Open Democracy, Lisbet Rausing worries about the future of the library. In the NYRB, Tim Parks warns non-English writing authors against liberal international readers.
The Walrus strolls through Johannesburg with the flaneurs. In Telerama, Olivier Bomsel defines the digital as script.The London Review is peeved that Christopher Hitchens is having so much fun. In Osteuropa, Hungarian writers and nihilists weave away at the deadly void. The New Statesman reads Vasili Grossman's "Everything Flows" and meets the great man's daughter. Al Ahram warns European Muslims about the perils of Salafism. Salon asks why Adrian Lamo turned in the alleged whistle-blower Bradley Manning and what Wired's Kevin Poulsen had to do with it.
The big stories of our time are being told in reportage rather than fiction, says novelist Geoff Dyer in the Guardian. Lettre International meets the marginalised in Rome and Rotterdam. In Espresso, Umberto Eco fantasises about 6 billion encyclopaedias. The Nation finds many ways to erase Israel from the map without being anti-Semitic. The Spectator speculates about the counter-cultural concentration camp that Glastonbury has become. The Atlantic waves farewell to men.
Prospect chucks contemporary art into the dustbin of history. Where it will join Polish book culture, if Res Publica Nowa is to be believed. And iTunes to boot, according to the New Yorker. In El Pais Semanal, the physicist Michio Kaku sees the internet everywhere. Young people however, claims the LRB, are proving remarkably resilient to its influences. In the NYRB, Timothy Snyder reviews Christopher R. Browning's new book "Remembering Survival" about the ghetto in Wierzbnik. Le Monde puts three Chinese dissidents on a pedestal.
The New Yorker escorts us into the extraordinary paranoid world of Wikileak founder Julian Assange. In Merkur, Udo di Fabio praises the egalitarian properties of money. The Economist discusses the latest mass import in Africa: homophobia. In Micromega, Paolo Flores d'Arcais cannot understand why Saviano needs defrocking. Paris is partying in celebration of the collapse of the Anglo-American system, das Magazin reports. n+1 delves into the Berlin Roman. The New York Times charts the success of Dutch politician Job Cohen.
The NYRB takes on the privatisation of the net by Steven P. Jobs. The NYT is already bored of life in the suburban Applecrest Estates. In Eurozine, Sven Egil Omdal delivers a comprehensive report on the crisis in the Norwegian newspaper industry. The Walrus learns how to become an expert from the unrepentant whore Jamie Lee Hamilton. In Elet and Irodalom, we learn how Hungarian nationalism foments Slovak nationalism, And Umberto Eco explains in Espresso, why he would never boycott Gianni Vattimo.
The Nation reads Jonathan Israel's history of radical Enlightenment. In Elet es Irodalom, György Konrad tells the Hungarians to stand up for freedom or kiss it goodbye. English is a Dalit goddess, standing on a computer, Tehelka says, and there's nothing you can do about it. In the Atlantic, Google's Eric Schmidt loses himself in his creepily colourful vision of the future. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg gives publishers the answer one would have expected from Google. Slate asks why Paul Berman is not being discussed by Arab intellectuals. Tygodnik Powszechny thinks about Polish-Russian reconcilation. Prospect explains why, in the future, you will be arrested for over-frequent visits to the toilet when flying.
The NYRB solves the Cuba dilemma. In Eurozine, Martina Simecka and Laszlo Rajk talk about their fathers, prominent communists who were persecuted by communists. Julian Barnes reads Eugene Delacroix's diary for the TLS. Odra asks why Bogdan Wojdowski has been forgotten. In Le point, BHL explains why he supports JCall's "Call for Reason". The New Yorker portrays Andrei Ternowski, the 17-year-old Chatroulette inventor. Wired calls on programmers to create a new Facebook, where privacy is respected.
The New York Times dives into the data streams of the self-trackers. N+1 assesses "The Intellectual Situation". In the Onfray vs. Freud debate, BHL defends the psychoanalyst against fatuous platitudes. Peter Nadas tells Magyar Narancs that capitalism will be to blame if Hungary goes to the dogs. For Tony Judt, re-education is the only way to combat authoritarianism. And in Salon, Miroslav Kusy explains that, in Slovakia, "the people" have been replaced by "human beings", but "citizens" have yet to be invited into the political arena.
In Eurozine, Kenan Malik asks what makes a real Muslim. For Osteuropa, Serhij Zadan travels though Ukraine's death valley. Wired visits old hackers. The most pig-headed of them, Richard Stallman, explains in the Boston Review, why cloud computing means thinking like a sucker. Frontline crosses the digital divide to where linux has transformed the lives of children in rural Bengal. The NYRB looks at why, after receiving 26 billion dollars in aid, Ethiopians are still hungry. In Magazin, the psychoanalyst Jürg Atlin warns about over-enthusiasm for cleansing in the wake of the paedophile scandals. Magyar Naracs observes a sacralisation of the state in Poland.