In the eye of the beholder

By Zafar Masud

NEWS just in from Cornish, a sleepy little place in New Hampshire in the US, is that the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger, who turned 90 on the first of this month is well and busy writing, though he has no intention of having published whatever he has written in these past 44 years.Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye still sells a quarter million copies a year. He published very little after that and his last known work remains Hapworth 16, 1924, a short story that appeared in the June 19 issue of The New Yorker in 1965.This side of the Atlantic, however, writers tend to be not at all as world-weary as Salinger. Au contraire! Ask Atiq Rahimi, the Goncourt winner last November.The Goncourt, by the way, is the highest literary prize in France. Created in 1896 according to the testament of Edmond de Goncourt, a rich, academic-minded nobleman, the honour is bestowed every year upon the author of a piece of literature in the French language. So far this invariably has been a novel.A cash award comes with the prize. Originally 10 francs in 1903, the amount has been upped, ostensibly to suit today’s buying power, to a generous 10 euros. A far cry from the million euros’ Nobel literary prize, you’d say. Still, the Goncourt winner makes it up by watching the sales of his work shoot up astronomically at the bookshops.Strictly going by the rules, the Goncourt can be conferred on a writer only once in a lifetime; but that is not to say that the stricture has been religiously adhered to always. The august award committee composed of 10 esteemed figures of French academia was once actually led down the garden path by the writer Romain Gary who had already been awarded the Goncourt in 1956 for Les racines du ciel (‘The Roots of Heaven’, also turned into a film with Errol Flynn in the lead). Gary came back in 1975 under the pseudonym Emile Ajar … and swept the Goncourt once more for his book La vie devant soi (translated into English as ‘Momo’). After having informed the committee about his irreverent farce, Gary took a teenager’s delight in giving out details of his prank during TV talk shows. Five years later he would place the barrel of his gun in his mouth, Hemingway fashion, and shoot himself. But we are digressing!The latest Goncourt winner, a bedizened Afghan named Atiq Rahimi, is currently in the spotlight for much more than his literary merit. His flowing locks, his felt hat perched at a rakish angle on the forehead, his colourful scarves rivalling those of President Hamid Karzai and his twinkling green eyes behind modishly narrow, rectangular glasses have not failed to attract the media’s attention.And to make sure things stay that way, at least for a while, Rahimi knows what to say when … and how to say it. Shortly after his award, an Anglo-French agreement was reached on repatriating illegal immigrants, many of them Afghans, from the Calais region along the English Channel. In a well-timed, Hamlet-like soliloquy, Rahimi declared to the media: “A magnificent slap after the Goncourt … but I say to myself, keep humble … you are nobody … good and ill fortune, glory, defeat … moments succeed one and another, one never far behind the other.…”His book, Syngué Sabour, is written in the same fragmented style, all 150 pages of it. The title that may sound to some a rather laboured phonetico-grammatical accomplishment signifying “the stone of patience”, is kept as it is on top of the French text. The plot has to do with the pain of an Afghan lady whose husband, a bullet in his head, has been reduced to a vegetative state. Throughout the book the wife delivers a monologue in which she gives vent to her conjugal and religious exasperations, expresses sentiments about war and peace and speaks as an Afghan trapped in an impossible situation; subjects coincidentally major preoccupations today among human rights groups and the media in the West.“Noble sentiments, heart-gripping tales and in-vogue causes as sure-fire recipe for best-sellers,” remarks not without a hint of irony a comment in Le Figaro Magazine’s literary section entitled ‘Literature or marketing?’ The article also cites the example of another literary award-winning novel in 2008, a tear-jerker about a brood of handicapped children in a poor family. The comment woefully admits at the conclusion that the infamous ‘politically correct’ ideology has now succeeded in making its way into the heretofore staid world of literary awards.Add to this the publishing houses, each getting its share of the cake in turns, and you are reminded of many more newspaper comments explaining why literary awards today have taken the populist bend and lamenting that the era of Victor Hugo and James Joyce is definitely over. Rahimi’s book, it is true, can be perused from cover to cover during one consistent metro ride from home to the place of work in Paris. Sentences are short, lines not more than six or seven words long. Some lines have just one or two words … so one hops effortlessly from page to page. The subject however is melancholy as the Afghan lady reminisces and administers medicine to her prostrate husband. Drop...by…drop!Atiq Rahimi, who spent a part of his youth in a refugee camp in Pakistan, has been living in France for the past 24 years. Syngué Sabour is his fourth book in eight years but the first in French. He makes short-length movies too and takes a very strong position in favour of the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan: “The very idea that democracy is a western idea and that Afghanistan, in the name of respect for its ancient culture, should be allowed to linger all by itself in obscurantism is insupportable. This is intellectual neo-racism.”To return to the book, it may make light reading, but Atiq Rahimi is in good company; the Goncourt was awarded in the past to the likes of Marcel Proust, André Malraux and Simone de Beauvoir.And then, beauty after all, lies in the eye of the beholder!The writer is a journalist based in Paris.