HUMOUR AND HUMANITY
Daniel Trilling

New Statesman
December 18, 2006

International literature explored the world of Zinedine Zidane and
brought us new works by Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel.

The posters on the wall of the Paris bookshop say it all: a photograph
of a floodlit football pitch, empty except for a ball resting
forlornly on the penalty spot. Underneath are emblazoned the words
"<em>La Melancolie de Zidane</em>". Whereas, this side of the Channel,
we make do with <em>Wayne Rooney: my story so far</em>, in November
France was treated to a philosophical tract on Zinedine Zidane’s
World Cup disaster by the Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

Published in an elegant slimline volume by the highbrow imprint Les
Editions de Minuit, <em>La Melancolie de Zidane</em> is a 17-page
reflection on that fateful moment when the player head-butted an
opponent during the World Cup final and was sent off, dashing France’s
hopes of victory. When interviewed by<em> ‘Equipe</em> magazine,
Toussaint declared that, although Zidane had broken the rules of fair
play, the head-butt itself was "novelistic in its ambiguity". Four
months on, it is a measure of how painful the event was to the French
national psyche that the arrival of Toussaint’s book has been treated
with awed reverence.

Across the border in Germany, painful memories of an altogether
different sort were dredged up this year. Gunter Grass, the Nobel
Prize-winning author, confessed that he had served in the Waffen
SS during the Second World War. The revelation shocked those who
knew Grass as an outspoken peace activist, and came ahead of the
publication of the latest volume of his memoirs, <em>Peeling the Onion
</em>(published in the UK by Harvill Secker next June). Grass, many of
whose novels deal with Germany’s wartime past, said that he had been
recruited aged 17 into an SS tank division, and though he had not felt
ashamed at the time, his silence over the years "weighed" upon him.

Reactions to the news were mixed. The head of Germany’s main Jewish
organisation said that it reduced Grass’s earlier anti-war statements
to "absurdities", and the former Polish president Lech Walesa said
that he should hand back his honorary citizenship of Gdansk. Other
writers, including Salman Rushdie and John Irving, defended Grass,
while others claimed that the revelation had been timed to boost
sales of his new book.

Two of Latin America’s best-known authors provoked controversy by
writing novels that cast the era of the conquistadors in a new light.

The Chilean author Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel from Mexico
both published novels about women who collaborated with the Spanish
colonisers. Allende’s <em>Ines of My Soul</em> (HarperCollins) tells
the story of Ines Suarez, a Spanish seamstress who became the lover of
the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, while Esquivel’s <em>Malinche</em>
(Simon & Schuster) tells the story of an Aztec woman who changed sides
and helped the Spanish conquer Mexico. Both authors hope that their
characters will be seen as misunderstood heroines, but reviewers have
complained that their books ignore the slaughter of indigenous peoples.

At least Allende and Esquivel could say what they liked about their
countries’ histories without fear of persecution. In Turkey, the
novelist Elif Shafak became the latest in a long line of writers,
editors and academics to be tried under a law that forbids citizens
from "insulting Turkishness". Many of these cases revolve around the
massacre of Armenians during the last days of the Ottoman empire,
an event that Turkey’s government refuses to accept was genocide.

In Shafak’s case, there was an added twist, in that the disputed
comments were made not directly by her, but by characters in her latest
novel, <em>The Bastard of Istanbul </em>(Viking). Shafak was unable
to appear in court because she had just given birth, but thankfully
the judges decided against sending a mother with a newborn baby to
prison for comments made by people who didn’t exist. The Turkish
prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, welcomed the verdict, but the
law still stands and other writers are facing trial.

Finally, while Iranian authors have been finding themselves writing
in an ever-more restrictive climate – the latest development being
the blacklisting of dozens of bestsellers – the Iranian-born graphic
novelist Marjane Satrapi has used her emigre status to produce works
that show a different side to Islam and Iranian culture from the
western media stereotype.

Her latest book, <em>Chicken With Plums</em> (Jonathan Cape), follows
the story of Nasser Ali Khan, a real-life musician whose heart breaks
when his favourite instrument gets smashed. Nothing will shake him
from this depression – not even his favourite meal, from which the
book takes its title – and Nasser Ali Khan is haunted by memories and
visions, communing with Sufi mystics, the spirit of his late mother
and even the Angel of Death.

Beautifully drawn, and written with humour and humanity, <em>Chicken
With Plums</em> is one of the year’s finest books and should be on
your wish-list if you don’t have a copy already.