From an unbelievably good book of short stories called Sarajevo Marlboro, by Miljenko Jergovic (translated by Stela Tomasevic):
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I flick through books, and wait for the carrots, parsnips and the lettuce to grow. Humans live out of curiosity. That's the best way, and the most honest way. Anything else is just a false way of courting other people's tears. Camus demanded and gave melodramatic explanations. For those whose death isn't accidental, the situation is as follows: women and homosexuals slit their wrists, soldiers and boors shoot themselves in the head, actors and romantics swallow pills, the clumsy and neurotic shoot themselves in the heart, the ignorant and the perverse hang themselves, the ambitious and the weak jump off bridges, sad cases and intellectuals jump from roofs or top floors.
The parsnips are the first to sprout, followed by lettuce and finally the carrots. The tiny leaves are as soft as a newborn baby's hair.
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As Voltaire suggests, sometimes the garden is all we have .
The rest of the book -- which I hope to review for ABR, and will blog my notes as usual -- features stuff like this:
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Elena was happy and successful. Zlaja was happy and unrealistic, Often she accompanied him on his drinking bouts but only when there was a gap in her busy schedule.....As a couple, they hadn't reckoned on the non-stop shellings: it couldn't be ignored or avoided; it destroyed real as well as imaginary worlds.
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No wonder some characters revert to parsnips. The only other choices are on the menu at the suicide cafe.
(Link is to another TSP excerpt, which a few of you may have heard me read in public.)
Writing about it, even to work it out, is an option only if you're not an illegal immigrant some bored FBI agent wants to nab. From Detainment, the blog set up to support the girls in Queens:
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In fact, an FBI official told The New York Daily News, "Nobody here
believes they are wanna-be suicide bombers." Another official at the
Department of Homeland Security commented, "We're not spun up about
this case." So why, then, are these young women in jail, cut off from
their families? Why are their lives being ruined? This is an insane
injustice.
Please open your hearts to both families. The family of A., the young Guinean woman, is in urgent need, and owes money to their lawyer. They have also lost their income, as the father has also been detained on immigration violations. As we learn more details about her situation, we may find they have other needs as well.
The young Bangladeshi woman, T., and her loved ones also face an enormous challenge. Her family needs to raise approximately $10,000 in the next three months just to get by. There are three children. The vast majority of the money would go towards housing, because the family has had to give up their apartment out of fear of surveillance or other threats to their safety.
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Ed, my little brother, commented rather poetically on this case: "I would rather we recieve comment for being wrong than cry later for doing nothing. " I won't argue here that those FBI agents could have been doing something more productive than reading teenn girls' high school essays; I'd just love for him, and the silent hordes who agree, to concede that there's no there there. It's time for someone bright at HSA to hear the comments, and to decide this is getting to be more of a pain than it's worth. And it's our job, I guess, to keep telling the story till something actually happens.
It's been on NPR as well as continuing Times coverage (though the latter will insist on mentioning a suicide bomb fear). but the girls are still detained. I feel proud of having been the first to throw this up in the commentish blogosphere (Body and Soul , The Heretik, and Bitch Ph.D. since made sure it got proper notice) and now wonder what else is possible. The power of the press, even the Times, is severely limited, at least against these monsters. (Click that NPR link and hear Nina Bernstein's frustration.)
I hope the girl who wrote the sincere essay about suicide and Islam is taking good notes in detention. Send her Dostoevsky and Malcolm X. Send her Jergovic as well (who some have compared favorably to Calvino), though he may be a little scatological for her current level of Islamic devotion. But voices from hell deserve such clear notes, and wide distribution.
I'm, certainly going to read more Jergovic if I can (he has two novels also). Knowing a little about translation, I looked up Tomasevic as well --
only to find that she has mostly done nonfiction before, and now works
for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
I hope she realized from this book that she's a poet, and years from
now writes her own fiction or narrative nonfiction. She could certainly draw it from
the ICTY commedia: Milosevic's clowning self-defense, rich NGO buzzards
in their expensive jackets .
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