Reviews and essays by Robert Fay.
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Jewish-Arab Coexistence and the Lost Cosmopolitanism
In André Aciman’s 1994 memoir Out of Egypt, he recounts the first meeting of his two grandmothers in an Alexandria, Egypt fish market. They two women discover they are both of Italian ancestry, by way of Ottoman Turkey, and as they talk further, “it suddenly occurred to them that of the six or seven languages…
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Defending Mothers: The Algerian Ghosts in Gaza and Israel
Zohra Drif strode into the Milk-Bar in Algiers on a hot September day in 1956. She ordered a milk shake, sat down, and calmly sipped from the straw as she checked and rechecked her wristwatch. The Milk-Bar was the largest ice cream parlor in Algiers, and a favorite stop for French-Algerian families, the pied noirs,…
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The Calvinism in Our Literature
Martin Luther spent the winter of 1522 hiding at Germany’s Watburg Castle. It was a smart move, for he had challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly on biblical interpretation and the pardoning of sins, and was not likely to receive a Christmas card, or much else in terms of support, from Pope Adrian VI that…
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Life, Literature & The Everything Novel
Last year I wrote an essay in 3 Quarks Daily trying to clarify my thoughts on “the total novel” or what I’ve started calling “the everything novel.” This is the land of Joyce, Gaddis, Musil and other giants. I took the essay, entirely reworked the middle and the ending, and recorded it for the Feeling…
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In Search of the Writer-Diplomat Tradition
Marcel Proust is forever being lost to myth, reduced either to a gossip who chronicled Parisian salons, or even worse, a withdrawn asthmatic overly sentimental for the past. This reduction makes no room for Proust’s admiration for technology or the diplomats and military men who made statecraft and war. Proust adored automobiles and was fascinated…
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DeWitt Planned to Publish ‘Lightning Rods’ Before ‘The Last Samurai’
Helen DeWitt’s struggles with the publishing industry have been well documented. She famously battled the copy editors of her first publisher regarding the correct typesetting of certain passages in her novel The Last Samurai (2000), which had pages of classical Greek and also Japanese characters (hiragana, katakana and kanji). In a 2016 Vulture profile of…
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