Matt Rees's Blog, page 36
August 13, 2009
Whose Abu are you?
Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:
In the West, our names tend to be pretty nailed down and unvaried. Unless you’re the child of some Hollywood goof who named you Moon Unit or Pilot Inspektor, you’re likely to share your name with many other people. Take me, for example. The family name Rees accounts for 15 percent of Welsh people – not to mention people descended from Welsh immigrants to the US, Canada, Australia. And it seems every other man of my generation is a Matthew.
Elsewhere in the world, people are more inventive. I had an Indian girlfriend in graduate school whose surname was Moorti. I noticed that her brother’s surname was Krishnamoorti. When I asked her to explain, she said that Indians could decide what their surname was themselves. That didn’t make much sense to me. So she just laughed and said I was “so Western.”
I’ve often confronted something similar in the Arab world, and it’s an element I’ve worked into my Palestinian crime novels – not just for cultural accuracy, but also as an important part of the plot. (But I won’t give away how!)
Arabs have a lengthy given name about which there’s relatively little choice. In the case of a Palestinian man, it’d be his name, followed by his father, grandfather, family and/or clan name. So my sleuth is Omar Yussef Subhi Sirhan.
But then there’s the tricky issue of the “kunya.” That’s when an Arab is known as “Abu-something”. Abu means “father of.” Traditionally a man is obliged to call his first son after his father. So even before his first son is born, if his father’s name was Muhammad, he’d be known as Abu Muhammad. (He’d actually be the son of Muhammad and only nominally the father of a future Muhammad…. But faith counts for everything, doesn’t it.)
My father’s name is David, so in Bethlehem I used to be known as “Abu Dahoud,” the Father of David. A few of my friends there were a little confused when I named my first son Cai. “Doesn’t your father object?” one of them asked.
My Omar Yussef is no traditionalist, so he decided to name his son Ramiz. Which wasn’t his father’s name. That means most people in the novels who want to show him respect and, at the same time, familiarity, call him Abu Ramiz.
It works the same way for women, though they’re tied to the name of their husband. Omar Yussef’s wife Maryam is called Umm Ramiz – the mother of Ramiz. No matter what her father was named.
So Abu refers to your father’s name, probably, and your son’s name, certainly.
Except when it doesn’t.
Sometimes the kunya is political nom de guerre. Yasser Arafat, who had no sons, called himself Abu Ammar, after one of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. It had a classical ring and also tied him to the early Muslim holy warriors.
A pal of mine who’s a big shot in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine calls himself Abu Leilah – Father of the Night. I once asked him if he had a daughter Leilah, and why he wasn’t named after his father even if he had no sons. “No,” he smiled, “I don’t have a daughter with that name. I just thought Father of the Night was an exciting name. Mysterious, you know.”
Some time later I was in the Lebanese town of Tripoli, investigating an uprising there by Islamic fighters who had returned from Afghanistan to battle the Lebanese army. The rising had been led by another Abu Leilah. He’d been killed by the army. I asked his family if he’d also thought Father of the Night was an exciting name.
“No,” one of them said, looking at me as though I had suggested the dead man was less than purely heroic. “His eldest girl is called Leilah.”
You can’t win, see.
Of course, in Arab society most men don’t want to carry a girl’s name and I never quite figured out why the Tripoli rebel did it. After all, for Palestinians, “Abu al-Banat” (Father of the Girls) is an insult aimed at men who haven’t been able to father any sons.
This is all the kind of thing that caused trouble with the US “no-fly” lists after 9/11. Perfectly innocent Abu Muhammads and Abu Ahmads, the Tom Smiths and Bob Joneses of the Muslim world, were suddenly
indistinguishable from people considered a danger to the nation. Including the real Omar Yussef, a friend of mine from Bethlehem.
My contribution to all this naming confusion is that in the UK I’m published as Matt Rees, while in the US I use my middle name and am therefore Matt Beynon Rees.
Why? Because I decide who I am.
Except when I’m in Bethlehem. There I’m “Abu Cai.”
In the West, our names tend to be pretty nailed down and unvaried. Unless you’re the child of some Hollywood goof who named you Moon Unit or Pilot Inspektor, you’re likely to share your name with many other people. Take me, for example. The family name Rees accounts for 15 percent of Welsh people – not to mention people descended from Welsh immigrants to the US, Canada, Australia. And it seems every other man of my generation is a Matthew.
Elsewhere in the world, people are more inventive. I had an Indian girlfriend in graduate school whose surname was Moorti. I noticed that her brother’s surname was Krishnamoorti. When I asked her to explain, she said that Indians could decide what their surname was themselves. That didn’t make much sense to me. So she just laughed and said I was “so Western.”
I’ve often confronted something similar in the Arab world, and it’s an element I’ve worked into my Palestinian crime novels – not just for cultural accuracy, but also as an important part of the plot. (But I won’t give away how!)
Arabs have a lengthy given name about which there’s relatively little choice. In the case of a Palestinian man, it’d be his name, followed by his father, grandfather, family and/or clan name. So my sleuth is Omar Yussef Subhi Sirhan.
But then there’s the tricky issue of the “kunya.” That’s when an Arab is known as “Abu-something”. Abu means “father of.” Traditionally a man is obliged to call his first son after his father. So even before his first son is born, if his father’s name was Muhammad, he’d be known as Abu Muhammad. (He’d actually be the son of Muhammad and only nominally the father of a future Muhammad…. But faith counts for everything, doesn’t it.)
My father’s name is David, so in Bethlehem I used to be known as “Abu Dahoud,” the Father of David. A few of my friends there were a little confused when I named my first son Cai. “Doesn’t your father object?” one of them asked.
My Omar Yussef is no traditionalist, so he decided to name his son Ramiz. Which wasn’t his father’s name. That means most people in the novels who want to show him respect and, at the same time, familiarity, call him Abu Ramiz.
It works the same way for women, though they’re tied to the name of their husband. Omar Yussef’s wife Maryam is called Umm Ramiz – the mother of Ramiz. No matter what her father was named.
So Abu refers to your father’s name, probably, and your son’s name, certainly.
Except when it doesn’t.
Sometimes the kunya is political nom de guerre. Yasser Arafat, who had no sons, called himself Abu Ammar, after one of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. It had a classical ring and also tied him to the early Muslim holy warriors.
A pal of mine who’s a big shot in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine calls himself Abu Leilah – Father of the Night. I once asked him if he had a daughter Leilah, and why he wasn’t named after his father even if he had no sons. “No,” he smiled, “I don’t have a daughter with that name. I just thought Father of the Night was an exciting name. Mysterious, you know.”
Some time later I was in the Lebanese town of Tripoli, investigating an uprising there by Islamic fighters who had returned from Afghanistan to battle the Lebanese army. The rising had been led by another Abu Leilah. He’d been killed by the army. I asked his family if he’d also thought Father of the Night was an exciting name.
“No,” one of them said, looking at me as though I had suggested the dead man was less than purely heroic. “His eldest girl is called Leilah.”
You can’t win, see.
Of course, in Arab society most men don’t want to carry a girl’s name and I never quite figured out why the Tripoli rebel did it. After all, for Palestinians, “Abu al-Banat” (Father of the Girls) is an insult aimed at men who haven’t been able to father any sons.
This is all the kind of thing that caused trouble with the US “no-fly” lists after 9/11. Perfectly innocent Abu Muhammads and Abu Ahmads, the Tom Smiths and Bob Joneses of the Muslim world, were suddenly
indistinguishable from people considered a danger to the nation. Including the real Omar Yussef, a friend of mine from Bethlehem.
My contribution to all this naming confusion is that in the UK I’m published as Matt Rees, while in the US I use my middle name and am therefore Matt Beynon Rees.
Why? Because I decide who I am.
Except when I’m in Bethlehem. There I’m “Abu Cai.”
Israel: Less corrupt than Somalia!
Seems even those holding the keys to the Holy Land need reminding that thou shall not steal. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — In its international survey of corruption, Transparency International (TI) ranks Israel a respectable number 33 out of 180 countries.
Pity the poor people of Somalia (rank: 180), because the graft stinks bad enough here, 147 places higher on the list.
Israel occupies its position on the TI scale between those other paragons of good government, Dominica and the United Arab Emirates, despite having its last prime minister under investigation for several corruption offenses, its former finance minister on his way to jail for dipping into union funds and its current foreign minister fighting an investigation into his business dealings.
The root of the corruption is cronyism in the political system. This week, the attorney general dropped an investigation of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who had allegedly made 260 political appointments against civil service rules. That was seen as a lifeline for one of his former ministers, Tzahi Hanegbi, who’s on trial for a mere 80 shady appointments.
But corruption isn't the biggest problem for Israel (which is why 33rd place in the TI survey is deceptively high). Rather it’s the refusal of Israeli politicians to acknowledge their wrongdoing that sets a tone for the entire society. Thanks to the men in its Knesset, Israelis are a nation of blame throwers.
Take former Health Minister Shlomo Benizri, who’ll be jailed for four years for bribe-taking, fraud, breach of trust and conspiracy as soon as the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur holidays are over. (He plans to be with his family for those.) Benizri is a powerful force in the Shas Party, which represents religious Jews with origins in Arab countries who’re known as Sephardi. Last week he denounced his sentence as racist.
His party chief Eli Yishai, who is also interior minister, this week called for his pal to be pardoned by President Shimon Peres, before he even begins his sentence. Yishai went on a national radio talkshow to say that “there’s no one who doesn’t tell me on the street that [Benizri’s conviction:] is because he’s Sephardi and religious.”
Shas has long played the ethnic card. Yishai is facing an imminent challenge to his leadership from Aryeh Deri, a former minister who was jailed for bribe-taking in 1999. Deri will shortly have completed the cooling-off period for politicians convicted of crimes “of moral turpitude,” after which they may once again run for positions of power.
Back then Shas ran an entire election campaign based around the slogan “He’s innocent,” with angelic photos of Deri and accusations that the Israeli establishment set out to crush a bright kid from the Moroccan immigrant underclass. Just lately Deri has been quoted as telling people close to him: “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see shame. I see an innocent man.”
Being a part of the establishment doesn’t necessarily cover a politician in anti-corruption Teflon. Ask Ehud Olmert, who left office as prime minister in March. It’d be an understatement to say that Olmert quit under a cloud. It was more of a storm of investigations.
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz told Olmert’s lawyers this week that he’d soon decide whether to charge the former prime minister in three corruption cases. Olmert’s accused of taking envelopes stuffed with cash from an American businessman. He’s also suspected of double-billing charities and the government for the same flights, using falsified receipts for travel expenses. Then there’s another case in which it’s alleged Olmert granted favors to his old law partner, saving one of his clients $11 million in taxes.
That’s only the short-list. The attorney general this week closed a bribery case against Olmert for lack of evidence. He’d previously dropped another case in which Olmert was suspected of helping an Australian friend buy a big Israeli bank, and another corruption investigation involving Olmert’s discounted purchase of a home on one of Jerusalem’s most exclusive streets.
So Olmert might get off scot free. Unlike his finance minister, Avraham Hirshson, who was sentenced in June to five years and five months in prison for embezzling $1 million from a trade union.
Olmert’s fighting all these charges. He, too, sees an innocent man in the mirror.
Across the Israeli wall in Bethlehem, there was what looked like better news last week. Corrupt old hacks from the Fatah Party were swept away in the first Fatah congress for 20 years. Young activists — mainly middle-aged, actually, though the previous chiefs were truly decrepit —replaced all but four of the 18-person Central Committee, disposing of a number of aged cronies of Yasser Arafat.
They replaced them with …. relatively youthful cronies of Yasser Arafat. The new faces include Jibril Rajoub, 56-year-old former head of Arafat’s West Bank secret police. During his tenure at the helm of Preventive Security, I tracked a scam Rajoub’s men were running in which wealthy businessmen would be arrested and big ransoms extorted from their family. He also had an official monopoly on the import of gasoline to the West Bank.
Fatah also elected Marwan Barghouti to the Central Committee. He’s serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for his part in the killing of four Israelis and a foreigner during the intifada.
And just like all those corrupt Israeli pols, Barghouti’s not saying sorry either.
JERUSALEM — In its international survey of corruption, Transparency International (TI) ranks Israel a respectable number 33 out of 180 countries.
Pity the poor people of Somalia (rank: 180), because the graft stinks bad enough here, 147 places higher on the list.
Israel occupies its position on the TI scale between those other paragons of good government, Dominica and the United Arab Emirates, despite having its last prime minister under investigation for several corruption offenses, its former finance minister on his way to jail for dipping into union funds and its current foreign minister fighting an investigation into his business dealings.
The root of the corruption is cronyism in the political system. This week, the attorney general dropped an investigation of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who had allegedly made 260 political appointments against civil service rules. That was seen as a lifeline for one of his former ministers, Tzahi Hanegbi, who’s on trial for a mere 80 shady appointments.
But corruption isn't the biggest problem for Israel (which is why 33rd place in the TI survey is deceptively high). Rather it’s the refusal of Israeli politicians to acknowledge their wrongdoing that sets a tone for the entire society. Thanks to the men in its Knesset, Israelis are a nation of blame throwers.
Take former Health Minister Shlomo Benizri, who’ll be jailed for four years for bribe-taking, fraud, breach of trust and conspiracy as soon as the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur holidays are over. (He plans to be with his family for those.) Benizri is a powerful force in the Shas Party, which represents religious Jews with origins in Arab countries who’re known as Sephardi. Last week he denounced his sentence as racist.
His party chief Eli Yishai, who is also interior minister, this week called for his pal to be pardoned by President Shimon Peres, before he even begins his sentence. Yishai went on a national radio talkshow to say that “there’s no one who doesn’t tell me on the street that [Benizri’s conviction:] is because he’s Sephardi and religious.”
Shas has long played the ethnic card. Yishai is facing an imminent challenge to his leadership from Aryeh Deri, a former minister who was jailed for bribe-taking in 1999. Deri will shortly have completed the cooling-off period for politicians convicted of crimes “of moral turpitude,” after which they may once again run for positions of power.
Back then Shas ran an entire election campaign based around the slogan “He’s innocent,” with angelic photos of Deri and accusations that the Israeli establishment set out to crush a bright kid from the Moroccan immigrant underclass. Just lately Deri has been quoted as telling people close to him: “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see shame. I see an innocent man.”
Being a part of the establishment doesn’t necessarily cover a politician in anti-corruption Teflon. Ask Ehud Olmert, who left office as prime minister in March. It’d be an understatement to say that Olmert quit under a cloud. It was more of a storm of investigations.
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz told Olmert’s lawyers this week that he’d soon decide whether to charge the former prime minister in three corruption cases. Olmert’s accused of taking envelopes stuffed with cash from an American businessman. He’s also suspected of double-billing charities and the government for the same flights, using falsified receipts for travel expenses. Then there’s another case in which it’s alleged Olmert granted favors to his old law partner, saving one of his clients $11 million in taxes.
That’s only the short-list. The attorney general this week closed a bribery case against Olmert for lack of evidence. He’d previously dropped another case in which Olmert was suspected of helping an Australian friend buy a big Israeli bank, and another corruption investigation involving Olmert’s discounted purchase of a home on one of Jerusalem’s most exclusive streets.
So Olmert might get off scot free. Unlike his finance minister, Avraham Hirshson, who was sentenced in June to five years and five months in prison for embezzling $1 million from a trade union.
Olmert’s fighting all these charges. He, too, sees an innocent man in the mirror.
Across the Israeli wall in Bethlehem, there was what looked like better news last week. Corrupt old hacks from the Fatah Party were swept away in the first Fatah congress for 20 years. Young activists — mainly middle-aged, actually, though the previous chiefs were truly decrepit —replaced all but four of the 18-person Central Committee, disposing of a number of aged cronies of Yasser Arafat.
They replaced them with …. relatively youthful cronies of Yasser Arafat. The new faces include Jibril Rajoub, 56-year-old former head of Arafat’s West Bank secret police. During his tenure at the helm of Preventive Security, I tracked a scam Rajoub’s men were running in which wealthy businessmen would be arrested and big ransoms extorted from their family. He also had an official monopoly on the import of gasoline to the West Bank.
Fatah also elected Marwan Barghouti to the Central Committee. He’s serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for his part in the killing of four Israelis and a foreigner during the intifada.
And just like all those corrupt Israeli pols, Barghouti’s not saying sorry either.
August 9, 2009
Five smokes and a new novel: Klaus Modick’s Writing Life
When my second novel A GRAVE IN GAZA was being translated into German, I received an email from my translator. He had a number of penetrating questions about certain phrases I'd used in the book. He also happened to be the only translator who asked me a question about any of my books (and my work is translated in 22 languages so far.) Perhaps it’s not for nothing that Germany is the country where that particular book seems to have had the greatest resonance. It’s also not for nothing that the translator was one of Germany’s most significant literary voices in his own right. I later met Klaus Modick last year in Hamburg, not far from his North German home in Oldenburg. Within 15 minutes, he had smoked five cigarettes and between us we’d come up with the plot for another of my Palestinian detective novels--with a Berlin angle. It's fair to say, we clicked. In return for his plot brainstorming, Klaus asked only that I name a good character “Klaus” and that, as it’ll be a murder mystery, he shouldn’t die too violently. This year in Leipzig Klaus and I chatted over dinner about the German literary landscape. I found it astonishing to hear how rare it is for a German writer to be translated into English. So I’m delighted to give you the insights of this fabulous, sensitive writer, who’s currently summering in that least Germanic of American cities, Los Angeles.
How long did it take you to get published?
My first books were academic literary criticism and thus do not really count. My first novella “Moos” (1984) was rejected by a couple of publishers, but after some months of straying and drifting over editors’ desks it was eventually accepted and became a so called critics’ success, i.e. praises but sales to cry for.
Would you recommend any books on writing?
I don’t think the circulating How-to-write-books-books are helpful. There’s no advice to talent or inspiration. But I did enjoy Stephen King’s “On Writing”, because it is very honest and unpretentious. And I also enjoyed Thomas Mann’s “Novel of a Novel” about the making of his novel “Doktor Faustus”. You can learn from it that ingenuity cannot be learned.
What’s a typical writing day?
Get up at about 8 o’clock, jog through the park, have breakfast, sit on desk, wait for inspiration which is like a cat (doesn’t come when called but only if it wants to), start editing and re-writing yesterday’s shift and use that as a springboard for today’s. Sometimes it works. Have lunch. Have a nap. Afternoons are for research, for reading and correspondances, also for daydreaming about all the great works I haven’t started yet and perhaps never will.
Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
It’s a novel about a German-jewish historian who escapes from the Nazis in 1935, emigrates to the USA, struggles through the miseries of exile, makes finally a career at a New England college - but eventually falls victim to the McCarthy witchhunt in the early 50’s. It’s a book about America, seen through the eyes and experiences of a German there. It’s called “Die Schatten der Ideen” (The Shadows of Ideas). If at all and why it’s great should be decided by the reader - the least I can say about it it’s pretty voluminous.
How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
Very little to nothing
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
Pretty much all
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?
I’m trying hard ...
What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” It’s the first sentence of William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride”. It is still my favorite book in all the world and I’m quite jealous about not having written it myself.
What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
If one picks “the best” one wrongs at least one hundred others. One candidate among the hundreds could be the golden dollar nailed to the mast of the “Pequod” in Melville’s “Moby Dick”.
How much research is involved in each of your books?
Depends on the subject. For “Schatten der Ideen” it took me about a whole year to get my facts together in order to get the fiction. But I have also written books which needed nearly no research.
Where’d you get the idea for your main character?
I ask myself who I could be if I would not be the one I am.
Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
Not specifically. But I do think that everybody who writes misses something in life (same for readers). R. L. Stevenson once said that writing means to an adult what playing means to the child. That means that not only pain and suffering compel us to write but also pleasures and fun, not only the lack of something but also affluence. (W. Somerset Maugham thought so, too.)
What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?
Give it to a reader who will recommend it to another reader who will recommend it to the next and ever so on. Worldwide.
What’s your experience with being translated?
It’s flattering. And it’s interesting, because one realizes that the book one wrote is more than this one and very book. It has siblings now.
Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?
I live entirely from writing, or to be more precise from the royalties. That includes not only my own books, but also translations and writing for the media. But my own books are the core of it all.
What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?
Being introduced to the audience as someone else.
What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
Writing the truth.
Omar Yussef "the best crime fiction can achieve"
The first rock concert I ever attended was a performance by Canada's greatest rockers Rush. I've loved Canadians ever since. In the London (Ontario) Free Press recently, Joan Barfoot gave me another reason to adore them. She gives a terrific review to the second of my Palestinian crime novels A GRAVE IN GAZA (UK title The Saladin Murders). Of my sleuth, she writes: "Omar Yussef is a brilliant creation--an outraged, modest, wry and dogged involuntary detective who is a clear, friendly and bitterly amusing comrade through the maze of horrors that a trapped populace endures. A Grave in Gaza, as well as Rees's previous Omar Yussef novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem, demonstrates the best qualities crime fiction can achieve -- gripping plots featuring a sympathetic protagonist about vital subjects."
August 7, 2009
A great “What if”: Richard Jay Parker’s Writing Life
In his terrific “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” Stephen King notes that the best way to start a novel is with a compelling “what if.” Try this one: “Vacation Killer” sends out a chain email declaring that he’s kidnapped a woman and that if you don’t forward the email to 10 friends he’ll “slit the bitch’s throat.” That’s about as good a “what if” as anyone--Big Steve included--could come up with. It’s the premise for Richard Jay Parker’s debut novel, STOP ME, which is out this week. Born in the same South Wales town as yours truly, for a long time Richard worked as a tv comedy writer, then as a tv producer. Aware that tv was a sinkhole of depravity (with shrinking budgets), he decided it was preferable to write about scary ways of killing people. He moved from London to the beautiful southwest England town of Salisbury and came up with STOP ME.
How long did it take you to get published?
About a decade. I got a good agent with my first novel but it was an odd and warty book and editors were full of either admiration or revulsion for it. None of the positive feedback translated into offers so I was encouraged to write something else. It took a few attempts before I found I enjoyed constructing twisted, contemporary thrillers but then my agent declared she wasn’t comfortable with the genre. I had so many close calls with other agents and publishers after that it became something of a joke. Luckily, my current agent encouraged me to submit some work to the agency he had been poached to. He sold STOP ME in a couple of months.
Would you recommend any books on writing?
Yes. ‘Conversations With My Agent’ by Rob Long. It’s a very funny indictment of the whole writing process (I started by writing scripts for TV). I’ve never read any ‘How To’ books without keeping a grimace off my face though. I think I’ve only properly read ‘Screenplay’ by Syd Field but I’ve always been itching to make my own mistakes. If you’re just starting out then obviously you can learn the basics of submission but those books can’t really teach you the most important thing, which can only come from writing, finishing a project, submitting a project, starting a new project.
What’s a typical writing day?
I’m pretty disciplined – 8 til 5 – but that’s just so I can give myself plenty of circling time. Twitter and email siphons off a good chunk of my day and when I finally run out of excuses, I knuckle down. I write in concentrated bursts but I don’t ever have a word target. Sometimes it’s a page sometimes it’s ten.
Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
Everyone suspects there’s something sinister about email chain letters. STOP ME begins with an email chain letter from the Vacation Killer. It describes a girl and must be forwarded. If it ends up back in the killer’s inbox he won’t slit her throat. Of course, nobody takes it seriously to begin with until the jawbone of a prostitute is sent to the police. The missing prostitute fits the description in the email. But the real story of STOP ME is in the relationship between two men via a website.
John R Bookwalter claims to be the Vacation Killer and runs a website based around this alleged delusion. He’s never left the state of Louisiana and the Vacation Killer has killed around the globe. He’s dismissed by the police as a crank but claims to have Laura, the wife of Leo Sharpe. She disappeared in London and the Vacation Killer was suspected. However, her remains were never sent to the police and Leo wonders why – did the email get back to the Vacation Killer’s inbox?
But as everyone around Leo gives up on Laura ever being found Bookwalter is the only person talking about her in terms of her still being alive. A bizarre relationship ensues even though Bookwalter’s attempts at verisimilitude are patently the product of the information Leo feeds him. However, Bookwalter comes up with the most plausible theory of how she was kidnapped and Leo must decide whether he should accept Bookwalter’s invitation to fly to Louisiana to find out if there is any truth in what he’s saying. That’s what the title STOP ME refers to - more than the emails. It’s about being drawn submissively into something you know you shouldn’t.
The book examines the phenomena of Internet celebrity and the public’s ongoing fixation with serial murder. It’s populated by blue collar characters – ordinary people who participate in/are drawn into bizarre activities behind the façade of normality.
How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?
Only my first novel was a hundred percent me. I think after that I was trying to balance retaining subject matter and ideas that excited me with making them presentable to a readership. Luckily I found the thriller genre because it allows me to explore the sort of twisted, juicy, contemporary ideas that inspire me within an accessible framework.
After writing my first thriller my thinking was - would I be happy to be pigeonholed as a writer of this genre? That’s the reality for most writers and my answer was ‘yes.’ I think in today’s climate it’s a sensible approach for an author who wants to be energized by what he writes and earn a living at the same time.
This is my personal approach and obviously what works for me won’t be right for others. My instinct is to marry my predilections with pragmatism. I would love to have my first novel published but recognize why it probably wouldn’t make it past the committee of a publishing house. I’m also grateful that it wasn’t the first book I had published because I hadn’t really found my feet in terms of what sort of writer I was. This meant I would have probably struggled with the second book and my trajectory would have fizzled very quickly.
What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
A great question because it’s impossible to answer – are we talking hackles, hoot, goose bumps or chin stroke? I’d have to just take one at random:
‘My Name is Arthur Gordon Pym.’ First sentence from ‘The Narration Of Arthur Gordon Pym’ by Edgar Allan Poe. This story concerns a character with the same name as me suggesting cannibalism when adrift at sea. Lots are drawn and Richard Parker is eaten. The story was written in 1838 and in 1884 it happened for real. And the cabin boy who was eaten? Richard Parker.
It certainly had an effect on my travel arrangements.
What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
Have gone for one that has always stuck with me - Bruce Robinson describing a fart as ‘a ghost of a sprout’ in ‘The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas Penman.’
Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?
Of contemporary writers I’d say Chuck Palahniuk – on form - is pretty unique
Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?
I’ve always loved the conceit of Hjortsberg’s ‘Falling Angel.’ I couldn’t outline my reason without giving away the ending to those who haven’t read it though. That must have been so much fun to write.
How much research is involved in each of your books?
I haven’t had a period of concentrated research for any of my books but that’s because I’ve so far written about subjects that I’m familiar with. My stories focus on ordinary people becoming embroiled in bizarre situations so I guess a lot of what I write is based on what my own personal reactions would be to those events. I’m also a big fan of Americana. My latest book involves Albanian gangsters, however, so that was one subject I needed to gather data for. It would be great to be able to spend more time immersing myself in more alien environments and getting a taste for an entirely new subject. Maybe in the future.
Where’d you get the idea for your main character?
There’s two main characters in STOP ME and I would say both of them are extensions of my own personality – my day-to-day personality and the side of me committed to dark mischief that only gets listened to when I’m at the keyboard.
Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
I can’t really think of anything in my childhood that compelled me to write. I had a stable and loving upbringing so who knows what ricocheted me towards the sort of dark subject matter that I’ve always got a kick out of. Maybe it’s still re-living that thrill of sneakily getting up to watch the forbidden late night horror movie – that addictive trespass on an entirely adult world. Ridiculous I know but my heart still sinks a little if I have to watch anything that doesn’t have an 18 certificate.
What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?
Am just finding out with my debut but all the advice I receive from other writers concurs - utilize the internet but don’t forsake local publicity – radio and signings etc.
What’s your experience with being translated?
None in books yet although I’ve seen my TV material crop up on YouTube in all sorts of languages. Must re-examine my contracts…
Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?
I’ve been lucky enough to have always been a professional writer and the past twenty years have been a mixture of exceptionally good years and stultifyingly bad years. I made the conscious choice to move from TV to novel writing ten years ago and it’s taken me until now to get my first into print. I hope to move forward with my next book but I have a realistic outlook on how things can transpire. I’ll always write though.
How many books did you write before you were published?
Eight. Four of which I would happily see in print. I won’t be reaching for old manuscripts now though. I still feel I have lots of new ideas to explore. I probably salvage bits of them without really knowing though.
What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?
Will let you know. I’m touring airports in the UK this summer promoting British thrillers.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/896...
Should be an eye-opener.
What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
My second novel – my agent described it as ‘supernatural pornography.’ Would have sold it to me.
How long did it take you to get published?
About a decade. I got a good agent with my first novel but it was an odd and warty book and editors were full of either admiration or revulsion for it. None of the positive feedback translated into offers so I was encouraged to write something else. It took a few attempts before I found I enjoyed constructing twisted, contemporary thrillers but then my agent declared she wasn’t comfortable with the genre. I had so many close calls with other agents and publishers after that it became something of a joke. Luckily, my current agent encouraged me to submit some work to the agency he had been poached to. He sold STOP ME in a couple of months.
Would you recommend any books on writing?
Yes. ‘Conversations With My Agent’ by Rob Long. It’s a very funny indictment of the whole writing process (I started by writing scripts for TV). I’ve never read any ‘How To’ books without keeping a grimace off my face though. I think I’ve only properly read ‘Screenplay’ by Syd Field but I’ve always been itching to make my own mistakes. If you’re just starting out then obviously you can learn the basics of submission but those books can’t really teach you the most important thing, which can only come from writing, finishing a project, submitting a project, starting a new project.
What’s a typical writing day?
I’m pretty disciplined – 8 til 5 – but that’s just so I can give myself plenty of circling time. Twitter and email siphons off a good chunk of my day and when I finally run out of excuses, I knuckle down. I write in concentrated bursts but I don’t ever have a word target. Sometimes it’s a page sometimes it’s ten.
Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
Everyone suspects there’s something sinister about email chain letters. STOP ME begins with an email chain letter from the Vacation Killer. It describes a girl and must be forwarded. If it ends up back in the killer’s inbox he won’t slit her throat. Of course, nobody takes it seriously to begin with until the jawbone of a prostitute is sent to the police. The missing prostitute fits the description in the email. But the real story of STOP ME is in the relationship between two men via a website.
John R Bookwalter claims to be the Vacation Killer and runs a website based around this alleged delusion. He’s never left the state of Louisiana and the Vacation Killer has killed around the globe. He’s dismissed by the police as a crank but claims to have Laura, the wife of Leo Sharpe. She disappeared in London and the Vacation Killer was suspected. However, her remains were never sent to the police and Leo wonders why – did the email get back to the Vacation Killer’s inbox?
But as everyone around Leo gives up on Laura ever being found Bookwalter is the only person talking about her in terms of her still being alive. A bizarre relationship ensues even though Bookwalter’s attempts at verisimilitude are patently the product of the information Leo feeds him. However, Bookwalter comes up with the most plausible theory of how she was kidnapped and Leo must decide whether he should accept Bookwalter’s invitation to fly to Louisiana to find out if there is any truth in what he’s saying. That’s what the title STOP ME refers to - more than the emails. It’s about being drawn submissively into something you know you shouldn’t.
The book examines the phenomena of Internet celebrity and the public’s ongoing fixation with serial murder. It’s populated by blue collar characters – ordinary people who participate in/are drawn into bizarre activities behind the façade of normality.
How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?
Only my first novel was a hundred percent me. I think after that I was trying to balance retaining subject matter and ideas that excited me with making them presentable to a readership. Luckily I found the thriller genre because it allows me to explore the sort of twisted, juicy, contemporary ideas that inspire me within an accessible framework.
After writing my first thriller my thinking was - would I be happy to be pigeonholed as a writer of this genre? That’s the reality for most writers and my answer was ‘yes.’ I think in today’s climate it’s a sensible approach for an author who wants to be energized by what he writes and earn a living at the same time.
This is my personal approach and obviously what works for me won’t be right for others. My instinct is to marry my predilections with pragmatism. I would love to have my first novel published but recognize why it probably wouldn’t make it past the committee of a publishing house. I’m also grateful that it wasn’t the first book I had published because I hadn’t really found my feet in terms of what sort of writer I was. This meant I would have probably struggled with the second book and my trajectory would have fizzled very quickly.
What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
A great question because it’s impossible to answer – are we talking hackles, hoot, goose bumps or chin stroke? I’d have to just take one at random:
‘My Name is Arthur Gordon Pym.’ First sentence from ‘The Narration Of Arthur Gordon Pym’ by Edgar Allan Poe. This story concerns a character with the same name as me suggesting cannibalism when adrift at sea. Lots are drawn and Richard Parker is eaten. The story was written in 1838 and in 1884 it happened for real. And the cabin boy who was eaten? Richard Parker.
It certainly had an effect on my travel arrangements.
What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
Have gone for one that has always stuck with me - Bruce Robinson describing a fart as ‘a ghost of a sprout’ in ‘The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas Penman.’
Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?
Of contemporary writers I’d say Chuck Palahniuk – on form - is pretty unique
Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?
I’ve always loved the conceit of Hjortsberg’s ‘Falling Angel.’ I couldn’t outline my reason without giving away the ending to those who haven’t read it though. That must have been so much fun to write.
How much research is involved in each of your books?
I haven’t had a period of concentrated research for any of my books but that’s because I’ve so far written about subjects that I’m familiar with. My stories focus on ordinary people becoming embroiled in bizarre situations so I guess a lot of what I write is based on what my own personal reactions would be to those events. I’m also a big fan of Americana. My latest book involves Albanian gangsters, however, so that was one subject I needed to gather data for. It would be great to be able to spend more time immersing myself in more alien environments and getting a taste for an entirely new subject. Maybe in the future.
Where’d you get the idea for your main character?
There’s two main characters in STOP ME and I would say both of them are extensions of my own personality – my day-to-day personality and the side of me committed to dark mischief that only gets listened to when I’m at the keyboard.
Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
I can’t really think of anything in my childhood that compelled me to write. I had a stable and loving upbringing so who knows what ricocheted me towards the sort of dark subject matter that I’ve always got a kick out of. Maybe it’s still re-living that thrill of sneakily getting up to watch the forbidden late night horror movie – that addictive trespass on an entirely adult world. Ridiculous I know but my heart still sinks a little if I have to watch anything that doesn’t have an 18 certificate.
What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?
Am just finding out with my debut but all the advice I receive from other writers concurs - utilize the internet but don’t forsake local publicity – radio and signings etc.
What’s your experience with being translated?
None in books yet although I’ve seen my TV material crop up on YouTube in all sorts of languages. Must re-examine my contracts…
Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?
I’ve been lucky enough to have always been a professional writer and the past twenty years have been a mixture of exceptionally good years and stultifyingly bad years. I made the conscious choice to move from TV to novel writing ten years ago and it’s taken me until now to get my first into print. I hope to move forward with my next book but I have a realistic outlook on how things can transpire. I’ll always write though.
How many books did you write before you were published?
Eight. Four of which I would happily see in print. I won’t be reaching for old manuscripts now though. I still feel I have lots of new ideas to explore. I probably salvage bits of them without really knowing though.
What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?
Will let you know. I’m touring airports in the UK this summer promoting British thrillers.
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/896...
Should be an eye-opener.
What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
My second novel – my agent described it as ‘supernatural pornography.’ Would have sold it to me.
August 6, 2009
New Republic: The Samaritan's Secret a 'wonderful detective thriller'
In his New Republic blog, the magazine's honcho Marty Peretz rightly rails at the failure of the Fatah Party to agree on anything at its conference this week in Bethlehem -- except that Israel killed Arafat. Rails because, of course, that's not going to reform this corrupt bunch of villains who're currently clogging Manger Square with their swanky wheels, nor is it going to improve the daily life of ordinary Palestinians one bit. Peretz then notes: "If you want to read a wonderful detective thriller by Matt Beynon Rees, whom L'Express called "the Dashiell Hammet of Palestine," pick up The Samaritan's Secret, in which Arafat's late life and death lurk as vivid presence and macabre ghost."
NPR on crime fiction
Wisconsin Public Radio airs a full hour discussing contemporary crime fiction. It's mainly an interview with the best crime fiction blogger, Peter Rozovsky, whose Detectives Beyond Borders is a fabulous read, full of information and sound opinions. The radio show focuses on "noir" -- which Peter defines more convincingly than anyone I've heard before as fiction in which the hero knows that he's doomed and heads right for it with a strange kind of acceptance. The discussion touches on the films of Truffaut and the books of Izzo, Khadra, Rankin and...well, me.
August 5, 2009
The Last Man in London
Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:
During my teens, my family lived in a house in Addington, at the very farthest reach of South London. At the bottom of the hill, the road made its final exit from London. Not quite wide enough for two cars, it traveled onto the North Downs of Kent. Sometimes I would ride my bike along the lane and up a hill overlooking the Downs and lie on the grass. I was the border between London and the rest of the world. When a car went by below, I’d send out a silent message to the driver: “You just passed the last man in London.”
Much of my time was spent looking in the opposite direction, wishing we lived in central London– where things happened, where the Underground came to your neighborhood, where there was life, damn it. Where I would feel at one with those around me. Not like “the last man,” the one at the edge of everything. Like any suburban teenager, I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but where I was. And central London was both elsewhere and not impossibly far away.
Most of my friends from that time and from university, too, ended up living and working right there in central London. Perhaps they knew it was the right place for them, or maybe they never cared to ask themselves that question. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted, and I never lived there. I went down the lane that wasn’t wide enough for two cars, and I never came back. If I hadn’t, I’m sure I’d still have written. But I doubt I would have seen as much or learned what I have about myself.
The Palestinian sleuth of my crime novels Omar Yussef is, for me, a satisfying character because he represents the insights I’ve gathered in distant, eventful travels. But he’s also a measure of my ability to understand the outsiders of other cultures. Not the people journalists typically rush toward–the prime ministers and generals and imams with their false rhetoric and their stake in things staying as they are. Rather they’re the people who seem to climb the same marginal hill that I mounted as a youth and look out wondering why their world isn’t better than it is. That’s the essence of Omar Yussef (and of the best “exotic detective” fiction).
That lane near our house went up onto the Downs and undulated toward Westerham, a beautiful place built around a sloping village green. At the center of the green, there’s a statue of General Wolfe, a native of the village who led British troops to victory against the French in Canada in the Seven Years War of the mid-Eighteenth Century. The latest historical research on Wolfe suggests he was a megalomaniac glory-hunter who got exactly the kind of heroic immortality he wanted when he died at the moment of victory in Quebec.
I haven’t paid the price exacted of Wolfe. (But then, no one’s built any statues of me, either.) I’ve been stoned, abused, hectored, threatened, held at gunpoint. I’ve come out of it with the kind of knowledge granted only to one of those who never expected to be loved by everyone and yet was never driven by hate–namely, an observant outsider.
The sense of being an outsider I experienced as the Last Man in London was alienating back then. But in Bethlehem and Gaza it still gives me a sense for the outsiders—whether that’s the Palestinians without their state, or the minorities who live among them, like the Christian Palestinians featured in THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM or the few hundred Samaritans who live on a hill overlooking Nablus and are at the center of THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET. It helped me identify the people who could teach me the most about myself, to build a bond of trust with them and understand them. It also led me to write the Omar Yussef mysteries as a direct challenge to every accepted Western idea about the Palestinians.
And to every idea I ever had about me. But that’s for another blog…
During my teens, my family lived in a house in Addington, at the very farthest reach of South London. At the bottom of the hill, the road made its final exit from London. Not quite wide enough for two cars, it traveled onto the North Downs of Kent. Sometimes I would ride my bike along the lane and up a hill overlooking the Downs and lie on the grass. I was the border between London and the rest of the world. When a car went by below, I’d send out a silent message to the driver: “You just passed the last man in London.”
Much of my time was spent looking in the opposite direction, wishing we lived in central London– where things happened, where the Underground came to your neighborhood, where there was life, damn it. Where I would feel at one with those around me. Not like “the last man,” the one at the edge of everything. Like any suburban teenager, I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but where I was. And central London was both elsewhere and not impossibly far away.
Most of my friends from that time and from university, too, ended up living and working right there in central London. Perhaps they knew it was the right place for them, or maybe they never cared to ask themselves that question. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted, and I never lived there. I went down the lane that wasn’t wide enough for two cars, and I never came back. If I hadn’t, I’m sure I’d still have written. But I doubt I would have seen as much or learned what I have about myself.
The Palestinian sleuth of my crime novels Omar Yussef is, for me, a satisfying character because he represents the insights I’ve gathered in distant, eventful travels. But he’s also a measure of my ability to understand the outsiders of other cultures. Not the people journalists typically rush toward–the prime ministers and generals and imams with their false rhetoric and their stake in things staying as they are. Rather they’re the people who seem to climb the same marginal hill that I mounted as a youth and look out wondering why their world isn’t better than it is. That’s the essence of Omar Yussef (and of the best “exotic detective” fiction).
That lane near our house went up onto the Downs and undulated toward Westerham, a beautiful place built around a sloping village green. At the center of the green, there’s a statue of General Wolfe, a native of the village who led British troops to victory against the French in Canada in the Seven Years War of the mid-Eighteenth Century. The latest historical research on Wolfe suggests he was a megalomaniac glory-hunter who got exactly the kind of heroic immortality he wanted when he died at the moment of victory in Quebec.
I haven’t paid the price exacted of Wolfe. (But then, no one’s built any statues of me, either.) I’ve been stoned, abused, hectored, threatened, held at gunpoint. I’ve come out of it with the kind of knowledge granted only to one of those who never expected to be loved by everyone and yet was never driven by hate–namely, an observant outsider.
The sense of being an outsider I experienced as the Last Man in London was alienating back then. But in Bethlehem and Gaza it still gives me a sense for the outsiders—whether that’s the Palestinians without their state, or the minorities who live among them, like the Christian Palestinians featured in THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM or the few hundred Samaritans who live on a hill overlooking Nablus and are at the center of THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET. It helped me identify the people who could teach me the most about myself, to build a bond of trust with them and understand them. It also led me to write the Omar Yussef mysteries as a direct challenge to every accepted Western idea about the Palestinians.
And to every idea I ever had about me. But that’s for another blog…
A bloated, stinking mass of Ariel Sharon
The aptly-named Ariel Sharon Park
Opinion: Israel’s biggest garbage dump is being redeveloped — and renamed.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
TEL AVIV — A bloated, stinking mass that everyone would have preferred not to have to see, but which nonetheless was thrust upon them. A sight that shamed the people of Israel and ought to have been marginalized, but which was situated right in the center of the nation and was impossible to ignore. In the end, it seems, people will decide they were too harsh in their judgments.
You might think I’m talking about the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who endured international isolation and domestic opprobrium for his uncompromising military and political career, only to end up grudgingly appreciated for his acceptance that Israel had to end its occupation of Palestinian land.
But I’m not. I’m referring to Ariel Sharon Park.
Israel’s biggest garbage dump, Hiriya, is being redeveloped as a park. This week plans are being finalized to include a 50,000-seat amphitheater as part of the project.
Laid out by German and Israeli designers, it’s trumpeted by the Israeli government as bigger than New York City's Central Park and the biggest urban park built anywhere in the world during the last century.
Hiriya’s switch from eyesore to attraction is a strange parallel to the career of Sharon. Now 81, he lies in a persistent vegetative state in Sheba Medical Center in a Tel Aviv suburb.
The prime minister had only just begun to convince world leaders that he was no demon and might in fact be the best hope for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, when he fell into a coma after a stroke in January 2006. He has never recovered.
Some might say Israeli politics haven’t either. Shortly before his stroke, Sharon had launched a new political party, Kadima. It attracted many centrist legislators from other parties and looked set to dominate the Knesset.
Sharon’s central policy at that time was to pull out of many of Israel’s West Bank settlements, just as he had done from its Gaza Strip settlements in 2005.
With Sharon off the scene, Israel was led by Ehud Olmert, a man without his predecessor’s military flair and experience. Olmert messed up an unnecessary war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in mid-2006. His approval ratings went — given polling margins of error — to zero, and all chances of a West Bank pullout went out the window.
The result: Israel’s current right-wing government, and the stubborn silence of the Palestinians who refuse to negotiate with it until the continued expansion of the settlements is frozen.
When I first came to Israel in 1996, Sharon’s career looked to be over. He’d been ostracized for his controversial role in Israel’s 1982 Lebanon invasion and for failing to prevent the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies.
Even the new right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, didn’t want him in his cabinet back then and cobbled together a new set of minor ministerial powers for Sharon, to buy off some of his friends in the Knesset. Later Sharon clawed his way into the Foreign Ministry and then to the prime minister’s office.
Hiriya, at that time, was just as unpopular as Sharon. It was the first sight I had of Israel when I left Ben-Gurion International Airport on the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway. I looked out of the taxi window at the 260-feet-high hill rising steeply out of the otherwise billiard-table flatness of the Dan plain and said, “Oh, a mountain? In the middle of a flat place like this?”
“It’s a mountain,” said my driver, with the kind of cynical sneer specific to Israelis that I would come to know so well in the ensuing decade. “A mountain of our shit.”
In fact, 112 acres of ordure a half-mile square, 565 million cubic feet of garbage gathered there since 1952, pumping out methane, carbon dioxide and sulfur. Bulldozers (also a common nickname for the unyielding Sharon) trundled about on top of the mound, shunting the trash into lanes and looking like childrens’ toys on the enormous excrescence. Flocks of gulls swarmed like flies on a giant reclining rhino.
Such dense clouds of gulls that they caused several engine failures when they collided with jets taking off or landing at Ben-Gurion over the years — one of the reasons for closing the dump in 1998.
As Prime Minister, Sharon supported the idea of turning Hiriya into a park. He blocked attempts to develop the area for housing.
There are now three recycling plants beside the hill of garbage, so in the end its bulk will be trimmed. Its greenhouse gases will eventually be used to create the electricity to light the amphitheater for nighttime shows. The whole park will cost $250 million and is expected to be completed by 2014.
Organizers have said the site will be an international tourist draw, like Stonehenge.
Well, there will be some archaeological sites inside the park—though not perhaps of Stonehenge’s magnitude. Some of them are from the ancient town of Bnei Brak, which used to stand in the Hiriya area during the Talmudic period.
This archaeological park will be named after Menachem Begin, the prime minister who was drawn into the Lebanon War by his defense minister, Sharon. When he saw how the war turned out, Begin fell into a depression — also prompted by the death of his wife — and lived in seclusion until his death in 1992.
Begin will be a sideshow to Sharon’s main billing at the park. It’s only a shame that Sharon’s stroke hit before he could make his disastrous conduct of the Lebanon War a footnote to his closing down of the Israeli colonies in the West Bank.
Opinion: Israel’s biggest garbage dump is being redeveloped — and renamed.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
TEL AVIV — A bloated, stinking mass that everyone would have preferred not to have to see, but which nonetheless was thrust upon them. A sight that shamed the people of Israel and ought to have been marginalized, but which was situated right in the center of the nation and was impossible to ignore. In the end, it seems, people will decide they were too harsh in their judgments.
You might think I’m talking about the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who endured international isolation and domestic opprobrium for his uncompromising military and political career, only to end up grudgingly appreciated for his acceptance that Israel had to end its occupation of Palestinian land.
But I’m not. I’m referring to Ariel Sharon Park.
Israel’s biggest garbage dump, Hiriya, is being redeveloped as a park. This week plans are being finalized to include a 50,000-seat amphitheater as part of the project.
Laid out by German and Israeli designers, it’s trumpeted by the Israeli government as bigger than New York City's Central Park and the biggest urban park built anywhere in the world during the last century.
Hiriya’s switch from eyesore to attraction is a strange parallel to the career of Sharon. Now 81, he lies in a persistent vegetative state in Sheba Medical Center in a Tel Aviv suburb.
The prime minister had only just begun to convince world leaders that he was no demon and might in fact be the best hope for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, when he fell into a coma after a stroke in January 2006. He has never recovered.
Some might say Israeli politics haven’t either. Shortly before his stroke, Sharon had launched a new political party, Kadima. It attracted many centrist legislators from other parties and looked set to dominate the Knesset.
Sharon’s central policy at that time was to pull out of many of Israel’s West Bank settlements, just as he had done from its Gaza Strip settlements in 2005.
With Sharon off the scene, Israel was led by Ehud Olmert, a man without his predecessor’s military flair and experience. Olmert messed up an unnecessary war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in mid-2006. His approval ratings went — given polling margins of error — to zero, and all chances of a West Bank pullout went out the window.
The result: Israel’s current right-wing government, and the stubborn silence of the Palestinians who refuse to negotiate with it until the continued expansion of the settlements is frozen.
When I first came to Israel in 1996, Sharon’s career looked to be over. He’d been ostracized for his controversial role in Israel’s 1982 Lebanon invasion and for failing to prevent the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies.
Even the new right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, didn’t want him in his cabinet back then and cobbled together a new set of minor ministerial powers for Sharon, to buy off some of his friends in the Knesset. Later Sharon clawed his way into the Foreign Ministry and then to the prime minister’s office.
Hiriya, at that time, was just as unpopular as Sharon. It was the first sight I had of Israel when I left Ben-Gurion International Airport on the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway. I looked out of the taxi window at the 260-feet-high hill rising steeply out of the otherwise billiard-table flatness of the Dan plain and said, “Oh, a mountain? In the middle of a flat place like this?”
“It’s a mountain,” said my driver, with the kind of cynical sneer specific to Israelis that I would come to know so well in the ensuing decade. “A mountain of our shit.”
In fact, 112 acres of ordure a half-mile square, 565 million cubic feet of garbage gathered there since 1952, pumping out methane, carbon dioxide and sulfur. Bulldozers (also a common nickname for the unyielding Sharon) trundled about on top of the mound, shunting the trash into lanes and looking like childrens’ toys on the enormous excrescence. Flocks of gulls swarmed like flies on a giant reclining rhino.
Such dense clouds of gulls that they caused several engine failures when they collided with jets taking off or landing at Ben-Gurion over the years — one of the reasons for closing the dump in 1998.
As Prime Minister, Sharon supported the idea of turning Hiriya into a park. He blocked attempts to develop the area for housing.
There are now three recycling plants beside the hill of garbage, so in the end its bulk will be trimmed. Its greenhouse gases will eventually be used to create the electricity to light the amphitheater for nighttime shows. The whole park will cost $250 million and is expected to be completed by 2014.
Organizers have said the site will be an international tourist draw, like Stonehenge.
Well, there will be some archaeological sites inside the park—though not perhaps of Stonehenge’s magnitude. Some of them are from the ancient town of Bnei Brak, which used to stand in the Hiriya area during the Talmudic period.
This archaeological park will be named after Menachem Begin, the prime minister who was drawn into the Lebanon War by his defense minister, Sharon. When he saw how the war turned out, Begin fell into a depression — also prompted by the death of his wife — and lived in seclusion until his death in 1992.
Begin will be a sideshow to Sharon’s main billing at the park. It’s only a shame that Sharon’s stroke hit before he could make his disastrous conduct of the Lebanon War a footnote to his closing down of the Israeli colonies in the West Bank.
Poetry from the ‘driest’ book of the Bible: Yakov Azriel’s Writing Life
A few years ago I was at a literary conference near Tel Aviv. I found an eclectic mix of writers on the panel with me. I’m a crime writer. You wouldn’t expect me to be paired with a writer of poetry who takes his inspiration from the stories of the Bible. But as Yakov Azriel read his poetry, I sat beside him feeling that no contemporary poems had ever touched me as deeply. They’re full of the knowledge of the Bible the Brooklyn-born poet garnered during his studies at Israeli yeshivas and his four decades living here. There’s something else though: they bring to life the hills and desert around Jerusalem. To an outsider, it can often seem strange that so many people are attached to a place that’s stark and rather ugly and certainly not a nurturing environment for sustaining human life. With Yakov’s poems I think you’ll find a sense of what the place means. Here’s his interview, followed by a wonderful poem from his newest book.
How long did it take you to get published?
It took a few years of submitting my first manuscript of poetry to different publishers until my first book of poetry was published.
What’s a typical writing day?
I make a living by working as a teacher, so during the daytime I do not have the opportunity to write. I usually try to write in the evenings and at night (especially at night); I try to write one new poem a week.
Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
My latest book is entitled Beads for the Messiah's Bride: Poems on Leviticus, and it was published in June by Time Being Books (a literary press specializing in poetry). Like my two previous books of poetry (Threads From A Coat Of Many Colors: Poems On Genesis and In The Shadow Of A Burning Bush: Poems On Exodus, each poem in the book begins with a Biblical verse and the book is structured as a running commentary, starting with chapter 1, verse 1 and ending with the last Biblical chapter.
This book was challenging for several reasons. My first book focused on the different characters in Genesis, and I especially tried to focus on the gaps in the Biblical narrative (for example, who was Abraham's mother?) or to give a voice to figures who are silent in the Biblical text (such as Dinah, or Joseph's wife Asenat). In the poems on Exodus, the many events in the Biblical narrative itself (the enslavement in Egypt, the Ten Plagues, Passover, the splitting of the Red Sea, etc.) readily lent themselves to poetry.
In contrast, the Book of Leviticus is considered to be "drier," without the drama and large cast of characters of the first two books of the Bible. One device I used in order to grapple with this difficulty was a conscious effort to fuse the English literary tradition with the Jewish-Hebrew heritage. For example, the first chapters of Leviticus deal with sacrifices; I decided to write a Petrarchan sonnet for each sacrifice, a sonnet that is a prayer, modeled after the "Holy Sonnets" of John Donne. In the end, one book reviewer felt that this book was the most powerful of my three published books (eventually, we will be publishing five volumes of poetry, one for each of the Five Books of Moses).
How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?
I write poetry in all forms: mainly free verse (like most 21st century poets), but also formal, metric poems — sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, ballads, etc. Each poem has a life of its own, and it is the poet's duty to help each poem find its own voice. Just as a sculptor has to liberate the statue that is hidden in a block of marble, so the poet has to liberate the poem hidden on the empty page and grant it breath.
As I said, all my poems are based on the Bible. The Biblical verse is like an iceberg, with 90 % of its meaning under the surface; my job is to try to get under the surface.
T.S. Eliot said that there is little good religious poetry being written today because the religious poet tends to write what he thinks he ought to feel instead of what he really feels. All good poetry must be sincere. So part of my task as a poet is to be sincere, as much as possible.
What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
This is a very difficult question to answer! One sentence that really resonates for me in English literature is when Hamlet describes his father to Horatio in Act I, Scene II, and tells him that "He was a man." What a wonderful example of praise, love and understatement in four simple words.
In Biblical literature, one sentence that that I find very powerful occurs right after the scene in which the prophet Nathan tells King David the parable of the poor man's lamb (First Samuel, Chapter 12) and King David, incensed, says that this man deserves to die; after Nathan exclaims, "You are the man," David does not argue but admits, "I have sinned."
What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
Again this is very difficult to answer, but I think that Dicken's description in Little Dorrit of the banquet scene in Rome in which Mr. Dorrit relives the past he has been trying so hard to conceal, and calls out loud to Amy, speaking about the turnkey and his imprisonment in the Marshalsea prison — this is certainly one of them.
How much research is involved in each of your books?
I have been "researching" my books all my life.
Where do you get your ideas?
This is a very good question. Often in the middle of the night an idea comes; I have to write it down, and the following evening, I work on it.
Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
No, I do not think that it stems from a childhood pain. Why do I write? Ask me why I breathe. The great German poet Rilke said that no one should write poetry unless he would have to die if it were denied him to write. Perhaps this is too strong (for me at least) but I cannot imagine a life for myself without writing.
What’s your experience with being translated?
I have translated several of my poems into Hebrew. However, you could perhaps claim that all of poetry is a kind of translation of dream language into waking language.
What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
To write it in Yiddish.
And now, some poetry: from Beads for the Messiah's Bride: Poems on Leviticus (Time Being Books, 2009)
THE SCAPEGOAT
“And Aaron shall place both his hands on the head of the scapegoat and confess upon it all the sins of the Children of Israel and all their crimes, whatever their transgressions; they will be put on the head of the scapegoat, which will be sent off to the desert in the hands of the executioner.” (Leviticus 16:21)
Bright crimson ribbons tied between his horns,
A clanking, clinking bell around his neck,
His back bedecked with ornaments of silk —
Why did the priest place hands upon my head,
Then trembling shout a list of sins and crimes?
I bet I know: they want to crown me king,
A wise and noble king who never dies.
An orchestra of Levites play their flutes,
Their golden harps, their ten-stringed lutes, their drums,
Their silver trumpets as he is taken out —
Why I alone am sent to Azazel?
And who or what the hell is ‘Azazel’?
I bet I know: they think I am an angel,
A pure, immortal angel full of grace.
Out of the Temple precinct packed with crowds,
And out the narrow lanes of Jerusalem,
And out Damascus Gate, toward desert cliffs —
Why am I brought here to this mountain peak?
Why rip the crimson ribbons from my horns?
I bet I know: they wish to worship me,
I bet I —
