Many thanks to Tarek Shahin for granting an interview about his book RISE (reviewed below), a collection of satiric cartoons from the Daily News Egypt from April, 2008 – April 2010, in the lead-up to the Egyptian Revolution. I hope this interview will shed some light on what it is like to be a cartoonist during the tensions near the end of the Mubarak regime and how one finds humor in serious topics:
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Cairo-born cartoonist Tarek Shahin, who counts Garry Trudeau as one of his idols, reveals many of the same insightful, irreverent, and humorous attitudes toward life in this collection of his own cartoons as Trudeau has shown in Doonesbury during his long career. Published every day, from April, 2008, through April, 2010, in the Daily Star, Egypt’s independent English language newspaper, Shahin’s “Al Khan” cartoons foreshadowed the popular revolution which eventually took place in Tahrir Square between January 25 and February 11, 2011. Using daily life and newsworthy events, both social and political, as his inspiration, Shahin provides an unforgettable vision of what life was like in Cairo in the months leading up to the revolution. For a western reader like myself, who saw the revolution from a distance and may have regarded it as a bit of a surprise, Shahin’s cartoons make this momentous event much more personal, immediate, dramatic, and most of all, understandable because the forces leading up to it, along with its full, lasting impact, can be connected with “real” people, even though those “real” people are cartoon characters.
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It is no overstatement to compare Swedish author Steve Sem-Sandberg’s epic novel about the people in the Lodz ghetto during World War II to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, published almost one hundred fifty years earlier. The real life dramas which the book illustrates, the memorable characters, the carefully developed themes which Sem-Sandburg treats in new ways, and the magnitude of the horrors easily make this book the equal of Tolstoy’s epic. The nature of the subject matter, of course, precludes any hint of romanticism here, but Sem-Sandburg is so good at varying scenes involving a series of fully human, repeating characters, that I cannot imagine any reader not becoming fully engaged with them, even though their stories have been created from piles of archival records, lists, and photographs and obviously have no happy endings. Beautifully written to memorialize the people of the ghetto, rather than the horrors of the Holocaust itself, this book is an awe-inspiring literary achievement.
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As close to perfect as a mystery can get, Denmark’s #1 crime writer, Award-winning author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s first novel to be translated into English has something that will entertain everyone. Very exciting with a unique plot, and filled with characters with whom the reader will identify, the novel is complex but not so dependent on odd details that the reader gets lost in complications, genuinely heart breaking in places without being sentimental, warm, and often very funny, to top it off. As fun to read as the novel is, Adler-Olsen also has something to say about contemporary life, creating an underlying thematic structure which carries a powerful kick as the novel comes to its conclusion. Who could want more than that? The first of his four Department Q novels to be translated into English, this is the beginning of a remarkable new series which has sold over a million copies in Denmark, which has a total population of only 5.5 million people.
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Claudia Hampton, an iconoclastic, sometimes imperious, often maddening, and completely liberated seventy-six-year-old woman, lies in a nursing home awaiting death—very reluctantly. Having earned her living as a reporter during the Cairo campaign in World War II and later as a popular historian, she sees no reason why she should not continue her work as she awaits death. ‘Let me contemplate myself within my [own] context,” she says, “everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents.” As she fades in and out of consciousness (her nurse wondering aloud to the doctor, “Was she someone?”), she plans her story for her usual readers, indicating that she will omit the narrative but “flesh it out; give it life and color, add the screams and the rhetoric…The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out…There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water..there is no sequence, everything happens at once.” By turns humorous, thoughtful, satiric, wonderfully philosophical, and consummately literary in its observations and allusions, this novel is an absolute treasure, one that will appeal to every lover of serious themes presented in new ways.
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