Solmaz Sharif is a Turkish-born American poet of Iranian descent and Stanford faculty member whose debut collection, published when she was thirty, was nominated for the National Book Award. While from my standpoint it would appear from this outline that her adopted country has embraced her and honored her talent as much as could reasonably be expected her work is very much fueled by rage against the inane brute power of the American state, especially in its military operations and other meddling in the Middle East. Most, if not all of the poems are take-offs on particularly antiseptic definitions from the U.S. government's official Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. This is a clever enough conceit, though I probably would have confined my use of it to trying to make one especially powerful poem. Over the course of a series of poems it relies too much on sarcasm, spite, the denigration and really dehumanization of mainstream American culture, people, soldiers, etc. Who is the audience supposed to be, even in an aspirational sense? Who is her "us" that she is one of, or would be one of? This was published by the Greywolf press, and is in line with what seems to be their aspirations and mindset. It appears to be edgy, it is the work of what is still considered in the West an outside voice, at least in terms of ethno-cultural background, and it is the kind of thing a lot of influential people say they want, though did I mention that the author teaches at Stanford? Isn't that place teeming with the people who run the damn country and start all these wars? I believe Condeleeza Rice herself is a colleague on the faculty. Yet I don't sense that this is where her anger is really directed.
I concede that she is intelligent enough and her points about the problematic nature of American military power put to use in foreign countries are reasonable though within the usual range of complaints and accusations from the progressive globalist left. She comes off as somewhat incurably joyless (do I come off this way I wonder?) and seems to be one of these people who is interested in "controlling" language with an end in mind of rendering those she considers to be her enemies mentally impotent, which are not appealing qualities in a poet. I happen to be reading some Swinburne currently for the program on my other blog, and I came across a passage he wrote in an essay on Baudelaire that I found interesting, and which attitude certainly informs the spirit of much of traditional Western European poetry, whether it is correct or not. He says, in an article dated September 6, 1862, of contemporary French poetry, "A French poet is expected to believe in philanthropy, and break off on occasion in the middle of his proper work to lend a shove forward to some theory of progress. The critical students there, as well as here, judging by the books they praise and the advice they proffer, seem to have pretty well forgotten that a poet's business is presumably to write good verses, and by no means to redeem the age and remould society." This does not apply exactly to Solmaz Sharif, though the main impression her book made on me was not the artistic quality or spirit of her writing but the sense that this person hates America so much but is possessed somehow of moral authority over us, somehow possesses, or believes herself to possess, a culture, insight and moral righteousness that we lack.
Anthony Marra's well-received 2013 debut novel is set in Chechnya, mainly during the two wars with Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, though time shifts throughout the course of the book and there are flashbacks at least as far back as World War II. The book struck me as similar to another book by a contemporary American man I had read, David Benioff's City of Thieves, which is set during the siege of Leningrad during World War II. The Eastern European/ex-Soviet Empire theme also recalls the acclaimed novel Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (set in Ukraine), which I have not read. The brother of one of my high school friends is coming out with a book set in old Jewish Prague that seems like it might make one of this school also. The three latter authors are Jewish. I am not sure whether Marra is or not, and the characters in his book were not Jewish that I picked up on, Chechens being generally Muslim I believe, though religious fervor was not a particularly strong force in the book. The heroine of the story, perhaps unsurprisingly given the way the smart contingent of this generation (the author was born in 1985) was brought up, was a dogged, serious, cosmopolitan, highly competent female doctor. There were times when I admired this book and thought there were flashes of talent, and certainly it is, like so much of what is written today, the work of an almost impeccably trained intelligence and professionalism. The characters didn't strike me as being very much like actual Chechens so much as what our meritocratic class imagines everyone whom they want to ennoble must be like. It was all a little too polite, I mean of course there were impolite people, but they were obviously bad, the murderous ones who had a lot of bad ideas besides. The sympathetic ones tended to have, even if they didn't realize it yet, manners and attitudes more in keeping with the right side of history and the globalist future.
As I say, this is not a bad book, but for the most part the war stuff hasn't stayed with me. The evocation of the typically dreary atmosphere, which is easier to imagine, has a little. The characters to me were more vehicles to represent certain kinds of people in certain ways desirable to people in influence rather than vivid people. Perhaps the world will develop (or deteriorate) in such a way that this type of character and their manner of thought will be attractive to reader types, or whatever evolves from them, fifty or sixty years from now, or two hundred as the case may be. Though that would surprise me.
I don't know if it is a full blown trend or not (though it seems like it to me), these books by younger American writers, primarily Jewish perhaps, set in far Eastern Europe, usually in wartime. I know younger writers in this country, especially men, have been discouraged for some time, if they are ambitious to succeed, from writing about themselves and their own lives if they come from any kind of conventional background, and taking an interest in other people and other ways of life. The Eastern European angle probably presents itself as a way to do this with people whose lives and interests are still somewhat relatable, though the two books I have read have an unmistakably modern American character--with happy endings where the protagonists end up safe and prosperous in the West--that, even when it is skillfully done, left me wondering what the real story or point that the writers want to get across is.
Also, as I think the popularity and success of Knausgaard with critics shows, ordinary life when taken up by someone who is a good writer and has an interesting mind can still yield books that people will want to read, even in the future if they find our time of interest, which many people will. I get the impetus behind discouraging everybody from following that course in the 1970s and 80s, but children's upbringings, especially those of the smarter and more privileged kids, over the last generation have changed dramatically enough that I want to read about them and see what these wunderkinder have to say.
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