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3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
First sentence: "'The names,', Claire said, 'what about the names?'"
P. 99: "There was something about the woman - a moral astringency - that begged both confession and challenge."
Last sentence: "With a pile of stones, he had written a name."
From BookDepository: A jury gathers in Manhattan to select a memorial for the victims of a devastating terrorist attack. Their fraught deliberations complete, the jurors open the envelope containing the anonymous winner's name--and discover he is an American Muslim. Instantly they are cast into roiling debate about the claims of grief, the ambiguities of art, and the meaning of Islam. Their conflicted response is only a preamble to the country's. The memorial's designer is an enigmatic, ambitious architect named Mohammad Khan. His fiercest defender on the jury is its sole widow, the self-possessed and mediagenic Claire Burwell. But when the news of his selection leaks to the press, she finds herself under pressure from outraged family members and in collision with hungry journalists, wary activists, opportunistic politicians, fellow jurors, and Khan himself--as unknowable as he is gifted. In the fight for both advantage and their ideals, all will bring the emotional weight of their own histories to bear on the urgent question of how to remember, and understand, a national tragedy. In this deeply humane novel, the breadth of Amy Waldman's cast of characters is matched by her startling ability to conjure their perspectives. A striking portrait of a fractured city striving to make itself whole, "The Submission "is a piercing and resonant novel by an important new talent.
This was the first choice for #TwitLit, the Twitter Reading Club of the Dutch newspaper NRC. And because I started hearing some good things about it, I ordered it immediately at BookDepository and started reading it the minute it arrived in my mailbox. The story itself also appealed to me; what would happen when the design of the memorial for the victims of the attacks of 9/11 in New York was the work of a Muslim? Waldman sets down a believable chain of events, that is so convincing at times I could have believed it really happened. I loved the way she described the feelings and actions of different characters that were involved; Mo (or Mohammad) the architect, Claire, the widow of one of the victims of the attack (a rich and beautiful woman), Asma, also the widow of one of the victims, but in totally different circumstances (Asma and her husband are illegal Bangladeshi's immigrants), Paul, the head of the jury that has to decide which design will be chosen for the memorial), and so on.
Although the characters are only briefly sketched, it is as if you know them; it is very easy to understand why they think and act as they do, and their reactions are only too human.
I think this debut novel will appeal to many people, both those that love a great story and those that want stories with real-life characters.
Other thoughts/reviews:
The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/03/paperback-qanda-amy-waldman-the-submission
Reviews from a Serial Reader: https://longingtobe.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/the-submission-amy-waldman/
Everyday I Write the Book: http://www.everydayiwritethebookblog.com/2018/07/the-submission-by-amy-waldman/
P. 99: "There was something about the woman - a moral astringency - that begged both confession and challenge."
Last sentence: "With a pile of stones, he had written a name."
From BookDepository: A jury gathers in Manhattan to select a memorial for the victims of a devastating terrorist attack. Their fraught deliberations complete, the jurors open the envelope containing the anonymous winner's name--and discover he is an American Muslim. Instantly they are cast into roiling debate about the claims of grief, the ambiguities of art, and the meaning of Islam. Their conflicted response is only a preamble to the country's. The memorial's designer is an enigmatic, ambitious architect named Mohammad Khan. His fiercest defender on the jury is its sole widow, the self-possessed and mediagenic Claire Burwell. But when the news of his selection leaks to the press, she finds herself under pressure from outraged family members and in collision with hungry journalists, wary activists, opportunistic politicians, fellow jurors, and Khan himself--as unknowable as he is gifted. In the fight for both advantage and their ideals, all will bring the emotional weight of their own histories to bear on the urgent question of how to remember, and understand, a national tragedy. In this deeply humane novel, the breadth of Amy Waldman's cast of characters is matched by her startling ability to conjure their perspectives. A striking portrait of a fractured city striving to make itself whole, "The Submission "is a piercing and resonant novel by an important new talent.
This was the first choice for #TwitLit, the Twitter Reading Club of the Dutch newspaper NRC. And because I started hearing some good things about it, I ordered it immediately at BookDepository and started reading it the minute it arrived in my mailbox. The story itself also appealed to me; what would happen when the design of the memorial for the victims of the attacks of 9/11 in New York was the work of a Muslim? Waldman sets down a believable chain of events, that is so convincing at times I could have believed it really happened. I loved the way she described the feelings and actions of different characters that were involved; Mo (or Mohammad) the architect, Claire, the widow of one of the victims of the attack (a rich and beautiful woman), Asma, also the widow of one of the victims, but in totally different circumstances (Asma and her husband are illegal Bangladeshi's immigrants), Paul, the head of the jury that has to decide which design will be chosen for the memorial), and so on.
Although the characters are only briefly sketched, it is as if you know them; it is very easy to understand why they think and act as they do, and their reactions are only too human.
I think this debut novel will appeal to many people, both those that love a great story and those that want stories with real-life characters.
Other thoughts/reviews:
The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/03/paperback-qanda-amy-waldman-the-submission
Reviews from a Serial Reader: https://longingtobe.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/the-submission-amy-waldman/
Everyday I Write the Book: http://www.everydayiwritethebookblog.com/2018/07/the-submission-by-amy-waldman/
This novel, set two years after the 9/11 attack, centers around the selection of memorial for the victims picked in a "blind contest" that turns out to have been designed by an American Muslim. This fictional tale reflects many of the words and actions surrounding the "ground zero mosque" from several years ago and the various characters make interesting stand ins for several different points of view and personality types. What I enjoyed most about this novel the way this story brought up questions and made you think: who are the victims and do some count for more than others, what does it mean to be a Muslim, what factors do we rely on when creating public art and memorials?
Book Review
Title: The Submission
Author: Amy Waldman
Genre: Art/Culture/Disaster/Historical
Rating: ***
Review: When, in December 2009, The New York Times first reported plans for a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, there was little controversy. Only subsequently, as a result of protests organized by groups like the Freedom Defence Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, did the project become the subject of passionate debate? It was they who named the community centre the “ground zero mosque.” In the months that followed, other vociferous opponents of the project emerged, among them not only conservative politicians like Newt Gingrich and some of the families of victims of 9/11, but also a number of Muslim leaders, who felt that the choice of site was insensitive and would complicate Muslim relations with the broader community. The controversy gave rise to a media frenzy that reached its height in the late summer of 2010. One imagines that the former New York Times journalist Amy Waldman heard these arguments with a combination of recognition and, perhaps, faint dismay: the general topic of her as yet unpublished first novel, “The Submission,” was proving disturbingly prescient. Her carefully imagined fiction was in the process of becoming fact.
“The Submission” is set not in 2010 but in 2003, and concerns not a mosque but a 9/11 memorial. A jury, assembled by the state’s governor, has spent months reviewing architects’ anonymous submissions for a monument to be built on the site of the tragedy. Finally, a winner is selected: the design is called “The Garden” (in contrast with the other finalist, “The Void”), and its detractors can fault it only for being “too beautiful.” But once the choice is settled and a name attached to the blueprints, the jury discovers, to its alarm, that the architect is a Muslim named Mohammad Khan.
His project is, obviously, the submission of the title, but from it arise questions about various other submissions: to whose will should the jury and, more broadly, the city and the state, submit? What are the standards to which Khan’s design, and he himself, should be held? To whom is he accountable? What of the fact that “Islam” itself means “submission to the will of God?” What does Khan want, and what do his benefactors want from him?
The ensuing uproar spreads from the seclusion of the jury room across the city, eventually to consume the entire nation. Only two years after the attacks, emotions are still raw. Rhetoric escalates, as does action. The tabloid media, unleashed, foment distress across the political and social gamut. Everyone wants his or her say, and everyone has an opinion about Mohammad Khan. His Garden is branded an Islamic garden, a “victory garden” indeed; and those who wish to fight it are adamant in their resistance.
With the keen and expert eye of an excellent journalist, Waldman provides telling portraits of all the drama’s major players, deftly exposing their foibles and their mutual manipulations. And she has a sense of humour: the novel is punctuated with darkly comic details. New York’s ambitious and expedient female governor greets the head of the memorial jury “on her elliptical machine in a black velour sweat suit.” A crucially sleazy journalist named Alyssa Spier opens one of her columns with the immortal line, “The problem with Islam is Islam.” Protesters against Khan wield signs like No Mecca in Manhattan and Stop Ji-hiding. The right-wing radio host Lou Sarge, whose tagline is “I Slam Islam” — a man with, as Asma Anwar, a Bangladeshi widow observes, “skin too white and hair too black” — lines up against his equally oleaginous Muslim counterpart, Issam Malik of the Muslim American Coordinating Council, both keen, chiefly, to dominate the airwaves. Another colourful figure, Debbie Dawson, the leader of Save America from Islam, “looked like a poorly weathered Angelina Jolie. She had to be close to 50, but her blog, The American Way, showed her in a see-through burka with only a bikini beneath.” Such aperçus would seem richly satirical were it not for the fact that they so closely reflect reality.
From this fertile material Waldman fashions her compelling ensemble piece, following closely a range of characters as the situation unfolds. These include the ne’er-do-well younger brother of a felled fireman, whose life since the attacks has been devoted to his brother’s memory and to assuaging his mother’s steely grief; the aforementioned jobbing journalist, who wishes she were Carrie Bradshaw of “Sex and the City” and who, when presented with the scoop of a lifetime, still struggles to keep her career on track; the retired financier who heads the jury, a suave maker of deals whose uxorious feelings provide his moral compass; and, most poignantly, the undocumented Bangladeshi immigrant, living in Brooklyn, whose husband was among those killed in the attacks. (“Of the 40 Bangladeshis reported missing to their consulate in the days after the attack, only 26 were legal. . . . The undocumented also had to be uncounted, officials insisted.”) Courageous and outspoken, especially given her circumstances as a widow with a small child, Asma succeeds in claiming compensation for her husband’s death, and ultimately speaks out in favour of Khan’s memorial — a failure to submit to convention that, for her, will prove costly indeed.
But the novel finally revolves around two characters upon whom the Garden depends. One is, obviously, Mohammad Khan himself, a 37-year-old American-born graduate of the University of Virginia and the Yale School of Art and Architecture whose attachment to principle and bristling pride are both his strength and his weakness. As the head of the jury observes, after yet another unsuccessful attempt to negotiate with his winner: “This obstinacy would be Khan’s undoing, Paul hoped. Yet perversely, Mo’s stubbornness was also increasing Paul’s respect, even affection for him, and perhaps salving his conscience, too. Khan had drive, Paul’s drive. If this contest didn’t make Mohammad Khan, something else would. He carried his own path within him.”
The other central figure is Claire Burwell, the juror most passionately in favour of the Garden at the novel’s outset, and the person whose interior trajectory proves most complex — an unravelling of sorts. Beautiful, glamorous and wealthy, Claire is a 9/11 widow, mother of two small children and the representative of the 9/11 families on the jury. As a result, it is she who faces the wrath of anti-Garden activists like Debbie Dawson; it is she who is pursued by the Alyssa Spiers. She even finds herself contacted by an old college sweetheart — not, as she hopes, out of romantic interest, but so he can press his political concerns.
If this lively and thoroughly imagined narrative has a weakness, it lies in Waldman’s decision to remain at a certain remove from these two central characters; in a sense, not to privilege them more. As the story unfolds, their fateful decisions are eminently plausible, but not always fully comprehensible. When Mohammad and Claire are linked by an epilogue, set many years later, the effect is sentimental rather than inevitable because we haven’t known either of them intimately enough to appreciate fully the personal weight of their choices.
Elegantly written and tightly plotted, “The Submission” ultimately remains a novel about the unfolding of a dramatic situation — a historian’s novel — rather than a novel that explores the human condition with any profundity. And yet in these unnerving times, in which Waldman has seen facts take the shape of her fiction, a historian’s novel at once lucid, illuminating and entertaining is a necessary and valuable gift.
Title: The Submission
Author: Amy Waldman
Genre: Art/Culture/Disaster/Historical
Rating: ***
Review: When, in December 2009, The New York Times first reported plans for a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, there was little controversy. Only subsequently, as a result of protests organized by groups like the Freedom Defence Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, did the project become the subject of passionate debate? It was they who named the community centre the “ground zero mosque.” In the months that followed, other vociferous opponents of the project emerged, among them not only conservative politicians like Newt Gingrich and some of the families of victims of 9/11, but also a number of Muslim leaders, who felt that the choice of site was insensitive and would complicate Muslim relations with the broader community. The controversy gave rise to a media frenzy that reached its height in the late summer of 2010. One imagines that the former New York Times journalist Amy Waldman heard these arguments with a combination of recognition and, perhaps, faint dismay: the general topic of her as yet unpublished first novel, “The Submission,” was proving disturbingly prescient. Her carefully imagined fiction was in the process of becoming fact.
“The Submission” is set not in 2010 but in 2003, and concerns not a mosque but a 9/11 memorial. A jury, assembled by the state’s governor, has spent months reviewing architects’ anonymous submissions for a monument to be built on the site of the tragedy. Finally, a winner is selected: the design is called “The Garden” (in contrast with the other finalist, “The Void”), and its detractors can fault it only for being “too beautiful.” But once the choice is settled and a name attached to the blueprints, the jury discovers, to its alarm, that the architect is a Muslim named Mohammad Khan.
His project is, obviously, the submission of the title, but from it arise questions about various other submissions: to whose will should the jury and, more broadly, the city and the state, submit? What are the standards to which Khan’s design, and he himself, should be held? To whom is he accountable? What of the fact that “Islam” itself means “submission to the will of God?” What does Khan want, and what do his benefactors want from him?
The ensuing uproar spreads from the seclusion of the jury room across the city, eventually to consume the entire nation. Only two years after the attacks, emotions are still raw. Rhetoric escalates, as does action. The tabloid media, unleashed, foment distress across the political and social gamut. Everyone wants his or her say, and everyone has an opinion about Mohammad Khan. His Garden is branded an Islamic garden, a “victory garden” indeed; and those who wish to fight it are adamant in their resistance.
With the keen and expert eye of an excellent journalist, Waldman provides telling portraits of all the drama’s major players, deftly exposing their foibles and their mutual manipulations. And she has a sense of humour: the novel is punctuated with darkly comic details. New York’s ambitious and expedient female governor greets the head of the memorial jury “on her elliptical machine in a black velour sweat suit.” A crucially sleazy journalist named Alyssa Spier opens one of her columns with the immortal line, “The problem with Islam is Islam.” Protesters against Khan wield signs like No Mecca in Manhattan and Stop Ji-hiding. The right-wing radio host Lou Sarge, whose tagline is “I Slam Islam” — a man with, as Asma Anwar, a Bangladeshi widow observes, “skin too white and hair too black” — lines up against his equally oleaginous Muslim counterpart, Issam Malik of the Muslim American Coordinating Council, both keen, chiefly, to dominate the airwaves. Another colourful figure, Debbie Dawson, the leader of Save America from Islam, “looked like a poorly weathered Angelina Jolie. She had to be close to 50, but her blog, The American Way, showed her in a see-through burka with only a bikini beneath.” Such aperçus would seem richly satirical were it not for the fact that they so closely reflect reality.
From this fertile material Waldman fashions her compelling ensemble piece, following closely a range of characters as the situation unfolds. These include the ne’er-do-well younger brother of a felled fireman, whose life since the attacks has been devoted to his brother’s memory and to assuaging his mother’s steely grief; the aforementioned jobbing journalist, who wishes she were Carrie Bradshaw of “Sex and the City” and who, when presented with the scoop of a lifetime, still struggles to keep her career on track; the retired financier who heads the jury, a suave maker of deals whose uxorious feelings provide his moral compass; and, most poignantly, the undocumented Bangladeshi immigrant, living in Brooklyn, whose husband was among those killed in the attacks. (“Of the 40 Bangladeshis reported missing to their consulate in the days after the attack, only 26 were legal. . . . The undocumented also had to be uncounted, officials insisted.”) Courageous and outspoken, especially given her circumstances as a widow with a small child, Asma succeeds in claiming compensation for her husband’s death, and ultimately speaks out in favour of Khan’s memorial — a failure to submit to convention that, for her, will prove costly indeed.
But the novel finally revolves around two characters upon whom the Garden depends. One is, obviously, Mohammad Khan himself, a 37-year-old American-born graduate of the University of Virginia and the Yale School of Art and Architecture whose attachment to principle and bristling pride are both his strength and his weakness. As the head of the jury observes, after yet another unsuccessful attempt to negotiate with his winner: “This obstinacy would be Khan’s undoing, Paul hoped. Yet perversely, Mo’s stubbornness was also increasing Paul’s respect, even affection for him, and perhaps salving his conscience, too. Khan had drive, Paul’s drive. If this contest didn’t make Mohammad Khan, something else would. He carried his own path within him.”
The other central figure is Claire Burwell, the juror most passionately in favour of the Garden at the novel’s outset, and the person whose interior trajectory proves most complex — an unravelling of sorts. Beautiful, glamorous and wealthy, Claire is a 9/11 widow, mother of two small children and the representative of the 9/11 families on the jury. As a result, it is she who faces the wrath of anti-Garden activists like Debbie Dawson; it is she who is pursued by the Alyssa Spiers. She even finds herself contacted by an old college sweetheart — not, as she hopes, out of romantic interest, but so he can press his political concerns.
If this lively and thoroughly imagined narrative has a weakness, it lies in Waldman’s decision to remain at a certain remove from these two central characters; in a sense, not to privilege them more. As the story unfolds, their fateful decisions are eminently plausible, but not always fully comprehensible. When Mohammad and Claire are linked by an epilogue, set many years later, the effect is sentimental rather than inevitable because we haven’t known either of them intimately enough to appreciate fully the personal weight of their choices.
Elegantly written and tightly plotted, “The Submission” ultimately remains a novel about the unfolding of a dramatic situation — a historian’s novel — rather than a novel that explores the human condition with any profundity. And yet in these unnerving times, in which Waldman has seen facts take the shape of her fiction, a historian’s novel at once lucid, illuminating and entertaining is a necessary and valuable gift.
What a beautiful piece of work. I truly enjoyed reading this despite, the difficult premise of the book. Each of Waldman's characters have a presence and a voice and they sugar coat NOTHING. The issues of racism, oppression, politics, gender, nationality and so much more truly drove this novel. Highly recommend this read.
A moving and realistic portrait of America in the aftermath of 9/11 and the confusing turmoil that the Unites States was thrust into. Waldman's cast of characters each lend a unique and compelling voice, and every single one makes you wish that they would bend just that tiny fraction in order to understand each other. Yet they don't and that is the true tragedy of the book, no one will submit to anyone else.
I was captivated with this book! I loved how Amy Waldman wrote this book using multiple voices. I found myself changing my point of view between Claire and Mo constantly. I won't say anymore just read this book!
I thought this book was very well written and described with great accuracy what might have happened had this scenario (a Muslim wins a contest to design the September 11 World Trade Center memorial) actually played out, but the characters were fairly flat, which made it hard to really get into the book. Still, it was an enjoyable read and, in case anyone is looking, one particularly well suited to book clubs. I definitely wouldn't mind having people to discuss this one with.
Lest we forget. I hope this book lasts. Waldman does an excellent job of capturing the variety of emotions in and out of NYC after 9/11.
On the surface, the book explores the varied reactions of America to the destruction of the Twin Towers. The design of a memorial becomes the focus of a multitude of emotions amd opinions. The book explores the politics of memorial. "It's almost like we fight over what we can't settle in real life through these symbols. They're our nation's afterlife." (p. 295) But "it would take more than a memorial to unite [the nation]." (p 274)
My interest waned halfway through the book as we were asked to follow almost too many characters and their reactions to the memorial. Jumping from person to person, culture to culture, I was ready to say "Enough already. I get it." Sticking with it I began to realize there was much more to the story.
I debated 4 or 5 stars, but settled on 5 stars because for me, the book was about more than a debate over a 9/11 memorial. Waldman is really asking whether art can be separated from the artist. Does it matter what the artist intends? Or is it more important how it is perceived by the viewer? She postulates that we should judge art and the artist separately. "You look at the creation, not the creator.... There's no inconsistency in loving one and reviling the other." (p. 272)
Another takeaway for me is that art is most successful when it evokes a unique interpretation for an individual. Each viewer or listener brings their own experience and imagination to its interpretation. Like Claire, we want things to be clear and simple, but the individualism of art is part of its beauty.
On the surface, the book explores the varied reactions of America to the destruction of the Twin Towers. The design of a memorial becomes the focus of a multitude of emotions amd opinions. The book explores the politics of memorial. "It's almost like we fight over what we can't settle in real life through these symbols. They're our nation's afterlife." (p. 295) But "it would take more than a memorial to unite [the nation]." (p 274)
My interest waned halfway through the book as we were asked to follow almost too many characters and their reactions to the memorial. Jumping from person to person, culture to culture, I was ready to say "Enough already. I get it." Sticking with it I began to realize there was much more to the story.
I debated 4 or 5 stars, but settled on 5 stars because for me, the book was about more than a debate over a 9/11 memorial. Waldman is really asking whether art can be separated from the artist. Does it matter what the artist intends? Or is it more important how it is perceived by the viewer? She postulates that we should judge art and the artist separately. "You look at the creation, not the creator.... There's no inconsistency in loving one and reviling the other." (p. 272)
Another takeaway for me is that art is most successful when it evokes a unique interpretation for an individual. Each viewer or listener brings their own experience and imagination to its interpretation. Like Claire, we want things to be clear and simple, but the individualism of art is part of its beauty.
I'm of two minds about this one. The controversy at the center of the plot is realistic in its nuance and its bureaucracy, but there were stylistic and maybe ideological choices the novel makes that I'm not sure I was entirely on board with.
this ended up falling very flat for me, so much so that i did not even bother to finish. i skipped ahead to the very end just to see but still did not entice me to finish reading it. I just did not care about any of the characters, kind of like how I felt with [b:The Imperfectionists|6834410|The Imperfectionists|Tom Rachman|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1291052624s/6834410.jpg|7045390].
I had high hopes for this one but was sorely disappointed.
I had high hopes for this one but was sorely disappointed.