When Cities of Salt, an Arabic novel by Abdelrahman Munif, was published in translation in 1988, John Updike reviewed it for The New Yorker. “It is unfortunate,” Updike remarked, “given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif, a Saudi born in Jordan, appears to be—though he lives in France and received a Ph.D. in oil economics from the University of Belgrade—insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer.”



Updike was writing near the end of the Cold War, confident in his pronouncements about the novel, the West, and about border-challenging writers like Munif, whose father was Saudi, mother Iraqi, and who at different points of his life held Algerian, Yemeni, and Iraqi passports. Stripped of his Saudi nationality and having fallen afoul of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, Munif wrote Cities of Salt in France. Of the fact that the novel, with its critique of American oil corporations and Arab oligarchies, was banned in Saudi Arabia, Updike had only this to say: “The thought of novels being banned in Saudi Arabia has a charming strangeness, like the thought of hookahs being banned in Minneapolis.”

THE GLOBAL NOVEL: WRITING THE WORLD IN THE 21ST CENTURY by Adam Kirsch Columbia Global Reports, 135pp., $12.99

It is hard to recall a foreign novel being greeted with such hostility in an American mainstream publication in the decades that followed the end of the Cold War. Foreign writers might still be considered strange or different, and they might not be covered at all. But even the notoriously elitist, insular establishment of book reviewers in New York did not see their novels as completely out of place in a world rapidly being shaped by globalization. In an era of cheap air travel, digital communications, consumerism, worldwide urbanization, and the dominance of English—all overseen by the United States as the world’s single remaining imperial power—readers, editors, and critics found it easy to welcome works by Haruki Murakami or Orhan Pamuk and the snapshots of foreign life they reveal.

In fact, the literary critic Adam Kirsch argues in his new book, The Global Novel, these circumstances have given rise to an entirely new literary category. No longer located tightly within national boundaries, and often written by authors who move between cultures, the global novel takes fiction’s usual remit—the examination of human nature—and places it in new cosmopolitan settings. The scope and structures of these books may vary: “A global novel can be one that sees humanity on the level of the species,” Kirsch proposes, “so that its problems and prospects can only be dealt with on the scale of the whole planet; or it can start from the scale of a single neighborhood, showing how even the most constrained of lives are affected by worldwide movements.” Yet such narratives are unified in their concern for “contemporary global problems, including immigration, terrorism, environmental degradation, and sexual exploitation.”

The differences that aggravated Updike, the suspicion of things not sufficiently Western, serve as approaches from which Kirsch draws inspiration. In the midst of xenophobic populism—the age of Brexit and Donald Trump—Kirsch counters that the global novel bears out Goethe’s belief that “poetry is the universal possession of mankind.” And the fact that readers have come to appreciate it shows, for him, the currency of liberal values “like tolerance of difference, mutual understanding, and free exchange of ideas.”