Archive for the 'News' Category

The Man Who Blew Up the Welfare State

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emily
on March 8, 2010
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From n+1 magazine:

To read the 1,802 pages of the Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce. In Larsson’s books, American readers will find the Sweden they expect: the welfare-state comforts, Volvo security, and Ikea practicality for which the country is known. But they will also find a country they didn’t expect. In this Sweden, the country’s well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked. And the criminals, of course, are crooked, though not always: it’s often the case that criminal acts committed by do-gooders in the name of justice—from petty larceny to massive bank fraud—are the only means by which to overcome the comprehensive failure of the world’s most comprehensive welfare system. More…

Michael Dirda on ‘In Other Rooms, Other Wonders’

Published
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emily
on January 29, 2010
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By Daniyal Mueenuddin From The Washington Post…

Because of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry, to mention just a few of the most prominent authors, American readers have long been able to enjoy one terrific Indian novel after another. But Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is likely to be the first widely read book by a Pakistani writer. Mueenuddin spent his early childhood in Pakistan, then lived in the United States — he attended Dartmouth and Yale — and has since returned to his father’s homeland, where he and his wife now manage a farm in Khanpur. These connected stories show us what life is like for both the rich and the desperately poor in Mueenuddin’s country, and the result is a kind of miniaturized Pakistani “human comedy.”

In the original Comédie humaine, Balzac had the ingenious notion of tying his various novels together by using recurrent characters. Eugène de Rastignac is the protagonist of Le Père Goriot but is subsequently glimpsed in passing or sometimes just referred to in several other books. In like fashion, Mueenuddin interlaces eight stories, while also linking them to the household of a wealthy and self-satisfied landowner named K.K. Harouni. In “Saleema,” for instance, Harouni’s elderly valet, Rafik, falls into a heartbreaking affair with a young maidservant, and we remember this, with a catch in our throat, when in another story we see him bring in two glasses of whiskey on a silver tray. In “Our Lady of Paris,” we discover that Harouni’s nephew is madly in love with a young American woman named Helen; later on, we discover that he is married — to an American named Sonya. More…