Why the novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi is still in love with Britain's pansexual, multicultural metropolis
August 10, 2008
My Beautiful London
By RACHEL DONADIO
The New York Times Magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10kureishi-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
One of the most revealing insights into Britain's recent social history comes early in "My Son the Fanatic," Hanif Kureishi's tender and darkly prescient 1997 film. It's morning in an unnamed city in northern England, and Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant taxi driver brilliantly portrayed by Om Puri, watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son, sell his electric guitar. "Where is that going?" Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. "You used to love making a terrible noise with these instruments!" Farid, played by Akbar Kurtha, looks at his father with irritation. "You always said there were more important things than 'Stairway to Heaven,' " he says impatiently in his thick northern English accent. "You couldn't have been more right."
This seemingly casual exchange cuts to the heart of almost everything that has animated Kureishi in nearly three decades as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist and essayist. This is, after all, the man who co-edited "The Faber Book of Pop" and whose films and novels — including "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "The Buddha of Suburbia" — are filled with raucous sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. But this is also the man who had the presence of mind to poke around in English mosques in the late '80s and early '90s, sensing that something might be stirring there, as indeed it was. Kureishi's novel "The Black Album," set in 1989 and named after a Prince album, explored the growing discontent, disenfranchisement and radicalism of some young British Muslims. Not so many people were paying attention back in 1995, when it first appeared, but 10 years later, when bombings rocked central London on July 7, the collective consciousness had begun to catch up. Now even the monarchy has taken notice. This spring, Kureishi, who recently turned 53, paid a visit to Buckingham Palace, where the queen named him a Commander of the British Empire. (The same day, she also bestowed honors on the Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue and several dozen others.) Not bad for a boy who grew up watching sitcoms in Bromley, a middle-class London suburb, the son of a Pakistani father and an English mother at a time when mixed marriages were still rare. Kureishi was delighted by the honor; he and his three sons went to the palace dressed in morning suits, while his partner wore a splendid feathered hat. "Do you know what it says on the medal?" Kureishi asked in a phone conversation after the May 1 ceremony. " 'For God and the Empire.' You can't get better than that. The only causes are the lost causes — or the nonexistent ones."
To many, Kureishi's C.B.E. is a sign of needed change. His accolade, along with Salman Rushdie's being knighted in June, indicates that these writers "aren't voices from elsewhere, these are voices from here, these are our voices," says Hannah Rothschild, a friend of both writers and a documentary filmmaker. "There's no divide anymore. They are us, we are them."
When Kureishi burst onto the scene in 1985 with "My Beautiful Laundrette," his Oscar-nominated debut screenplay, few would have imagined that he would wind up with the initials C.B.E. after his name. The film, directed by Stephen Frears, detonated all kinds of cultural assumptions with its depictions of a gay skinhead (played by a wiry young Daniel Day-Lewis), various Thatcherite Pakistani businessmen and their wives and lovers. Today, Kureishi hasn't quite mellowed, but he does seem to be enjoying his evolution to honored eminence from angry young man — or from rebellious son to adoring father of three young boys, whom he talks about constantly.
KUREISHI DISCUSSED HIS LIFE and work with me not long ago as we sat in a cafe in Shepherd's Bush, the now-gentrifying corner of West London where he has lived for years. "It was Blair, really, who started giving awards to trash," he said, half-joking. "Rubbish entertainers, people from the arts. Before that writers didn't get anything, really." Then again, he added, "If it's good enough for Kylie Minogue, it's good enough for Hanif Kureishi, isn't it?" With intent, dark eyes and spiky gray hair, Kureishi tends to look perpetually taken aback, as if he had just been struck by a cold blast of air. More reserved than standoffish, he's often reluctant to discuss certain questions, preferring instead to deflect them with darkly comic self-deprecation. But when he seizes hold of an idea, the power of his insights is formidable.
Kureishi's latest novel, "Something to Tell You," which will be published in the United States later this month, is his most ambitious book since "The Black Album." A sprawling romp set in London, it centers on Jamal, an Anglo-Pakistani Freudian analyst confronting certain unresolved questions about his past. Along the way, his best friend, Henry, takes up with Jamal's sister, Miriam, a petty drug dealer and distributor of porn videos and other items that fell off the back of a truck. Everyone is swept up in a wave of late-onset kinkiness. As in so much of Kureishi's work, there's a lot of sex here. Little is left to the imagination. At one point, Jamal goes to a basement sex club, its walls covered in whips and costumes, and asks a prostitute to dress like a British Airways hostess. While he waits for the Viagra and the painkillers to kick in, the prostitute tells him she's working toward a master's degree. "She was 'doing' decadence and apocalypse, always a turn-of-the-century preoccupation, along with calls for a 'return to the family,' " Kureishi writes. "Unfortunately, this millennium, our fears had turned out to be realities. It had been worse than we imagined."
In our conversation, Kureishi described the novel as "a critique of the notion of limitless pleasure," a re-examination of the sexual revolution. "Is this what we thought we would be in the '60s when were dancing around with flowers in our hair wanting a more erotic and a more sexual life?" he said as he drank his peppermint tea. "If the society doesn't install the values anymore," he went on to say, "your happiness and your pleasure is entirely up to you; you have to work and earn it and install your own moral values." This, he pointed out, accounts for a common "complaint of the West against radical Islam: 'Why do they have to keep asking God? Why can't they, as it were, make up their own minds?' Well, it's much harder to install your own moral values than to have them imposed by other people or by the system." Things were "miserable" when he was growing up in the '60s before the sexual revolution, Kureishi said, but now, he added, "we've moved from repression to unrepression" — which comes with its own strictures.
As is clear from his new novel, Kureishi often uses a psychoanalytic lens. He himself has been in therapy since the '90s — "you start to feel better after about 10 years," he joked — and related that it has been "very stimulating in terms of ideas" and "ways of seeing the world." But for him, the return of the repressed transcends Freudian cliché. It's a crucial theme, a key to understanding recent history, not just family dynamics. In Kureishi's view, radical Islam and radical sexuality intersect. "They produce each other in some way," he said. Indeed, to Kureishi, the rise of radical Islam is nothing less than the return of the repressed writ large. "You can't help but laugh," he told me. "The project of the West, the Nietzschean project, has been to drive out religion and to produce a secular society in which men and women make their own values because morality is gone. Then suddenly radical religion returns from the Third World. How can you not laugh at that? How can you not find that a deep historical irony?"
Kureishi's work is filled with immigrant parents not entirely at home in England but far removed from the India and Pakistan of their youth. Their children — coming of age in a white England filled with lower-middle-class lowbrows; naïve, privileged hippies; and the occasional skinhead — find that England doesn't entirely accept them, either. In many ways, Kureishi's England is not so far from V. S. Naipaul's. But while the dean of postcolonial British letters operates on the Conradian model, marinating his characters in their own ironies while remaining removed from the racket on the telly and the music charts, Kureishi is more along the lines of a Nick Hornby — a voracious consumer of pop culture. "I'm a big fan of what's been often denigrated for not being high art," Kureishi declared at a public reading in London in March. He grew up reading Balzac, Beckett and Kafka, he said, but also watching classic British low comedy of the 1960s and '70s like the "Carry On" films, and admiring James Dean, Marlon Brando and the Beatles.
This embrace of pop culture came through loud and clear in "The Buddha of Suburbia," Kureishi's semi-autobiographical first novel, published in 1990. Set in the 1970s in the London suburbs, it centers on Karim Amir, the child of an English mother and an Indian father who simultaneously falls in love with his friend Charlie, a posh girl named Eleanor, acting and punk rock. Meanwhile, Karim's previously strait-laced father takes up with an English mistress and begins teaching vague Eastern platitudes to suburbanites hungry for spiritual learning — or at least looser-fitting clothing. (Karim's mother, the saddest character in the book, retreats into her own depression.) David Bowie, with his chameleonic sexual persona and glam-rock appeal, is the presiding spirit. (Kureishi, as it happens, graduated from the same secondary school as Bowie.) The novel also has vivid supporting characters, including the tragicomic Uncle Anwar, who goes on a hunger strike until his freewheeling, feminist, lesbian daughter, Jamila, agrees to an arranged marriage. Changez, her imported Indian husband, neglects his work at Anwar's corner shop, and soon takes up with a Japanese prostitute.
The novel and a subsequent BBC mini-series made Kureishi a hero to a generation of British Asians and other nonwhites, a kind of postcolonial Philip Roth who brought to the mainstream themes that were previously relegated as "ethnic" and added lots of sex and humor. "What, above all, made Kureishi a talismanic figure for young Asians was his voice," the critic Sukhdev Sandhu wrote in The London Review of Books in 2000. "We had previously been mocked for our deference and timidity. Kureishi's language was a revelation. It was neither meek nor subservient. It wasn't fake posh. Instead, it was playful and casually knowing." But that doesn't mean it went over well with parents. Sandhu recalls how his father — who left India for England in 1965 and worked in a Nestlé factory, and was taunted by local schoolchildren and punks as he walked home with sacks of chapati flour — beat him up after Sandhu insisted that the family watch "My Beautiful Laundrette" on TV. With nudity, gay sex, Pakistani businessmen cheating on their wives and a drug smuggler disguised as a mullah with heroin sewn into his fake beard, the film wasn't just a wake-up call to white Britain; it also flew in the face of the traditional immigrant narrative. "Why are you showing us such filth?" Sandhu's father asked him. "My father was right to be appalled," Sandhu wrote. "The film celebrated precisely those things — irony, youth, family instability, sexual desire — that he most feared." It taught his father, Sandhu added, "that he could not control the future. And control — over their wives, their children, their finances — was what Asian immigrants like him coveted."
When Kureishi's films and writing first appeared in the mid-'80s, the literary world was just waking up to London's ethnic variety. Back then, literary England was "a BBC, plummy-voiced, West London, educated thing that just wasn't getting the whole place," says Bill Buford, who published Kureishi when he was editor of Granta in the 1980s and is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. Buford went on to explain that the success of "Midnight's Children," Rushdie's Booker Prize-winning 1981 novel, helped show that cross-culturalism and the varieties of the English language "were exciting, urgent, entertaining, serious literary concerns" and were also "the stuff of books people wanted to buy."
Over the years, Kureishi has "pulled off a high-low thing," says Robert McCrum, a former literary editor of The Observer in London who edited Kureishi at Faber & Faber in the 1980s. "He both sells in supermarkets and is taken seriously as a proper writer." In this regard, Kureishi is very much a product of London, Britain's centralized cultural capital, where he is able to move fluidly between the literary and film worlds in ways that would be difficult in the United States. And because England's film scene has lower financial stakes (and better state subsidies) than America's, Kureishi has been able to make emotionally ambitious yet modest-budget films whose unresolved, ambivalent endings defy Hollywood convention. He contains multitudes, and London suits them all. If Kureishi "could somehow figure out how to express himself in a rock band or in a pop tune he'd be very happy," Buford said. "It would complete something very deep. He's too shy and too deferential, but if he could somehow do 'Hanif: the Rap Version,' it would somehow complete a circle."
KUREISHI HAS HAD A PROFOUND EFFECT on younger South Asian and black writers. Zadie Smith, at 32 one of the brightest lights in the next generation of British novelists, fondly recalls reading "The Buddha of Suburbia" at age 15. "There was one copy going round our school like contraband — when it was my turn I read it in one sitting in the playground and missed all my classes," Smith wrote to me recently in an e-mail exchange. "It's a very simple pleasure that white readers take absolutely for granted: I'd never read a book about anyone remotely like me before." Today, "The Buddha of Suburbia" is taught in some schools. (At the public reading in London in March, Kureishi acknowledged that "if I'd known my books might have got on the school curriculum, I would have made them less dirty.") Kureishi says that he's friendly with Smith, and with Monica Ali, the author of "Brick Lane," but that he has not read either's novels. He may not be in close contact with the younger generation he inspired, but he does teach a creative-writing workshop at Kingston University in London.
After the success of "The Buddha of Suburbia" and the intensity of "The Black Album," Kureishi's later fiction hasn't always been well received. Sandhu's essay, which begins with high praise, evolves into withering critique. "Kureishi is not a prose writer of any distinction," he wrote, referring to Kureishi's 1999 novella "Midnight All Day." In the end, Sandhu argued, Kureishi lacked Roth's literary brilliance. "Like his characters," Sandhu continued, "Kureishi seemed to have reached an impasse." But his new novel seeks to propel those characters forward into new and treacherous times.
Writing runs in the Kureishi family. Hanif's father, who worked for decades as a civil servant at the Pakistani Embassy in London, was an aspiring writer who remained unpublished. Kureishi wrote "My Ear at His Heart," his 2004 memoir about his father, after his agent, Deborah Rogers, gave him a manuscript his father once submitted to her. Fathers and sons remain a deep and abiding theme. Kureishi's own family life is not uncomplicated. His 1998 novella, "Intimacy," is a brutal account of a man on the eve of leaving his partner and two small sons for a beautiful younger woman — as Kureishi himself had done. (Over the years, Kureishi has been criticized for misogyny and emotional cruelty, not least for the number he does on the woman left behind in "Intimacy.") Today, Kureishi lives in a row house with his partner, Monique Proudlove, and their 10-year-old son, Kier, while Sachin and Carlo, his 14-year-old twin sons from his earlier relationship with Tracey Scoffield, a film-and-television producer, are often around.
After breakfast at the local cafe, I persuade Kureishi to let me see his house and study. Earlier, he told me he was reluctant to have me "round" since "the missus" doesn't like journalists, but it quickly becomes clear from Proudlove, a self-possessed woman with slate-gray eyes who greets us in the entrance hall, that it's Kureishi who's protective of his privacy. In the living room, which is dominated by a drum kit, I was struck by the juxtaposition of books on the shelf: some novels by Henry James, Caroline Moorehead's biography of Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre's "Situations" next to Naipaul's "Among the Believers" next to Roger Scruton's "Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic." Definitely guidebooks to Kureishiland. The writer works in a roomy study upstairs, its walls filled with images: a photo of the young John Lennon, a poster of a painting by William Blake, a Matisse-like painting of Monique. There are stacks of CDs on the desk — Prince, Jeff Buckley, the soundtrack to "Trainspotting" — and some photos of Kureishi's sons. Above the desk I also notice a small black-and-white image: a man on his knees, his face firmly planted between the legs of a naked woman.
This is not surprising. Kureishi's books are extremely raunchy. Nearly every page you turn, someone is being fellated, spanked, tugged on — or is thinking about it. Nipples are clamped. Wax is dripped. Things are inserted into places you would hardly have imagined possible. In the '70s, Kureishi even wrote literary pornography under the pen name Antonia French. I ask him about his interest in pornography, which seems to go beyond the strictly anthropological. "When I was a kid and you wanted to come into contact with something sexy or dirty, you'd read a book," Kureishi said. "Can you imagine?" Harold Robbins, Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade. "D. H. Lawrence, can you imagine, as a sexual aid?" Today, literary pornography is a lost art, he says, but dirty pictures are available everywhere. "The much more interesting question might be, 'What else is it that people need to make a life?' It might be very easy to find sexual satisfaction, but getting someone to love you for a long time or loving someone might be more interesting." This is a thoughtful observation — but it doesn't entirely answer the question.
When you get down to it, there are two types of people in Kureishi's work: those running toward sex and those running away from it. The seekers of sex, or at least pleasure, are the suburban teenagers (and their parents) coming of age in "The Buddha of Suburbia" and the immigrant movers and shakers in "My Beautiful Laundrette." In Kureishi's most recent film, "Venus," an aged Peter O'Toole takes up with a potty-mouthed young woman (Jodie Whittaker), and in his film before that, "The Mother," a new widow (Anne Reid) takes up with her daughter's intense boyfriend (played by Daniel Craig, before he became James Bond).
Meanwhile, the sex-avoiders are the conflicted young Muslims of "The Black Album" and "My Son the Fanatic." In "My Son," directed by Udayan Prasad, Parvez, the immigrant taxi driver, cannot understand his son Farid's new interest in Islam. Farid explains what he's seeking. "Belief, purity, belonging to the past," he says insistently. "I won't bring up my children in this country." In another scene, a dissolute and despondent Parvez strikes his son over and over, until Farid finally shouts, "Who's the fanatic now?"
KUREISHI FIRST HAD THE IDEAS for "The Black Album" and "My Son the Fanatic" (a short story before it became a film) when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini announced a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, after Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" was published. In "The Black Album," he wrote about the appeal of British mosques, oases in an otherwise rigidly hierarchical country "where race and class barriers had been suspended." In the novel, some of the young Muslims burn copies of "The Satanic Verses." The Rushdie fatwa was a galvanizing moment, a coming-of-age experience for young Muslim radicals in Britain, a number of whom have become today's British Muslim leaders. It marked a turning point, an unsettling new chapter. And Kureishi was alert to the intergenerational drama. "It perplexed me that young people, brought up in secular Britain, would turn to a form of belief that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived," Kureishi wrote in "The Word and the Bomb," his excellent 2005 essay collection, which unfortunately has never appeared in the United States. "Why did they wish to maintain such a tantalizing relation to their own enjoyment, keeping it so fervently in mind, only to deny it? Or was this Puritanism a kind of rebellion, a brave refusal of the order of the age — an oversexualized but sterile society?"
Like Parvez in "My Son the Fanatic," Kureishi's Pakistani father "was educated by both mullahs and nuns, and developed an aversion to both," Kureishi wrote in the introduction to his collected screenplays. "He came to love Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong, the music of black American former slaves. It is this kind of complexity that the fundamentalist has to reject." Kureishi first visited Pakistan in the early 1980s and wrote about it in Granta and elsewhere. One line about Pakistan from "My Beautiful Laundrette" still resonates: "That country is being sodomized by religion," Nasser, a successful entrepreneur played by Saeed Jaffrey, tells his brother. "It's beginning to interfere with the making of money."
Although Kureishi recognizes the sense of powerlessness and sting of racism that have helped push many young British Muslims toward radicalism, he is intolerant of such intolerance. "The antidote to Puritanism isn't licentiousness, but the recognition of what goes on inside human beings," Kureishi wrote in the title essay of "The Word and the Bomb." He added: "Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination."
BACK AT THE CAFE IN SHEPHERD'S BUSH, I asked Kureishi about some vexing recent developments that received a lot of attention in the British press: a state agency for assessing public religious schools had given a top rating to a Muslim school that was advocating a return to the Caliphate; the interior minister at the time, Jack Straw, came under fire for suggesting that it might be difficult for a community-relations functionary to meet with constituents who wear a full veil; an Indian woman living in England was lured back to India and murdered in an honor killing; the archbishop of Canterbury said he thought England might consider making some accommodation for Shariah, or Islamic law. What, I wondered, did Kureishi make of all this?
"There aren't any answers to these questions," he replied. "They're just questions that everybody has to engage in and think about. What is it like to make a multicultural society? How far do you go in multiculturalism? Do you have parts of the country under Shariah law, for instance? What would that mean? How does that work? You have to take this stuff seriously."
Kureishi told me that he and Stephen Frears, who remains a close friend, sometimes used to joke about what would happen if Shariah law were to come to the "godless" people of Dorset, where Frears has a country house. Then came the archbishop of Canterbury's widely criticized — and arguably misunderstood — remarks. Still, Kureishi said, the idea that the archbishop is pondering "the imposition of medieval law on parts of the English countryside" is "hilarious."
As if it weren't already clear, Kureishi isn't a moralist. In one conversation, he was adamant that he's "not advocating anything," just observing. (He did, however, say he was opposed to Muslim women in Britain wearing the veil, "because of what it symbolizes: a part of Islam that's deeply oppressive to women.") At the reading in London in March, Kureishi was dismissive of rhetoric about British national identity and the notion that immigrants should become more integrated into the society. "I don't think there's any obligation for anyone to integrate," Kureishi told his audience. "They are people entitled to live as they wish." Besides, he added, why are only immigrants or their children asked to integrate? "The royal family don't integrate," he said. "Prince Philip doesn't integrate." Kureishi mentioned Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 film "Ali: Fear Eats the Soul," in which a German woman is reviled by her neighbors after she marries a Muslim guest worker. "Everyone hates them," Kureishi told me. "He says: 'I'm trying to integrate here. If we don't integrate, they say we're isolated. If we do integrate by trying to marry your women, you hate us even more.' The guy can't win."
Kureishi is currently at work on two screenplays, one set in Poland and London, the other in Paris. France, as well as the rest of Europe, is "going through a huge crisis about identity, race, religion," Kureishi went on to say. "Their identities have been shattered by immigration. That's the price you pay. If you want a modern economy, you have hundreds of thousands of workers around your country, you give up . . . a certain part of your identity. That's the deal." Then, he pointed out, you have to remake the society, and "it's that remaking that Europe is experiencing at the moment. But it's really tricky to have your identity shattered and remade."
The effects of the transformation are still in progress. In London, Kureishi and I walked around Shepherd's Bush Market, where the old eel-and-pie shops of the white working class are giving way to African butchers selling pig tails, tripe and yams. At one booth, Kureishi ordered a falafel to take home for lunch, "with extra hot sauce, boss." He was particularly intrigued by a shop selling cheap electronic picture frames in which a plane flies across the Dubai skyline. As we strolled past vendors selling suitcases, plastic sandals and T-shirts that said "If you see da police, tell a brother," I asked him about the bombings on July 7, 2005, which killed 52 people and wounded more than 700 on the London transit system. "Everyone was waiting for it to happen," he said.
The bombings figure in "Something to Tell You," Kureishi's new novel, where they touch all the characters and kill a few of them. The novel, with its protagonists fitfully grappling with middle age, brings together everything in the Kureishi repertoire: fathers and sons, psychoanalysis, kinky sex, drugs, Muslim radicalism — leavened with biting wit and sardonic cultural observation. Omar, the young laundrette entrepreneur from "My Beautiful Laundrette," makes an appearance; he's made a fortune producing television "for, by and about minorities" and has been made a peer, Lord Ali of Lewisham — under Blair, of course. "Being gay, Omar Ali was smart enough to know how hip and fashionable minorities — or any outsiders — could become, with the right marketing, as they made their way up the social hierarchy." Charlie Hero, the punk rocker from "The Buddha of Suburbia," also makes a cameo, as does Mick Jagger. Old scores are settled, and there's a not-so-subtle parallel drawn between 1970s-era anticapitalist radicals who seek to harm a factory owner and today's Islamic radicals. But above all, "Something to Tell You" is a raucous love song to London and everything it stands for — everything the July 7 bombers were intent on destroying.
ON MY LAST DAY IN LONDON, I wandered around Bloomsbury, past the British Museum, with its crowds of tourists, past stately Russell Square, with its redbrick facades, toward my destination: Tavistock Square, an unassuming park lined on one side with Georgian row houses. It was here, on the adjacent road, that the July 7 bombers detonated a bus bomb. I'd always thought the location of the bus was arbitrary, and it might well have been. But the square is no ordinary landmark. As Kureishi writes in "Something to Tell You," "that beautiful London square" is "where Dickens wrote 'Bleak House' and Woolf 'Three Guineas'; where Lenin stayed and the Hogarth Press published James Stratchey's Freud translations." It has a statue of Gandhi and plaques commemorating conscientious objectors and victims of Hiroshima.
In the hollow marble underneath the Gandhi statue, visitors had placed flowers wrapped in colorful cellophane and a few candles. A pale sun shone through bare brown branches. The square was a living monument to liberal democracy and egalitarianism, a microcosm of cultural achievement, the full flowering of Modernism and modernity. The new British Library was a few blocks away, as was the School of Oriental and African Studies and University College London. On July 7, 2005, this corner of the city, for centuries home to intellectual debate, instead became a battleground. In the weeks after the bombings, Kureishi entered the fray. "You can't ask people to give up their religion; that would be absurd," he wrote in The Guardian. But hard-line views might modify "as they come into contact with other ideas." That was the essence of "effective multiculturalism": not a superficial exchange of festivals and foods driven by liberal guilt, but something else entirely — an encounter with human desires in all their complexity. Or, as he wrote, "a robust and committed exchange of ideas — a conflict, which is worth enduring, rather than a war."
Rachel Donadio, a former editor and writer at the Book Review, is the incoming Rome bureau chief of The Times.
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