In Profile

Two very good profiles make for enjoyable Sunday reading: Rachel Cooke's profile of Robert Fisk in the Guardian, and Robert Worth's article on Syrian writer Khalid Khalifa's new book, "In Praise of Hatred," in the New York Times.

The Fisk article really is excellent, managing to describe what makes him at one time so admirable and at the other so infuriating. "'Have you read any Fisk?' he asks me on the telephone before I land in Beirut," Cooke writes, "a question that is insulting on so many levels." At the same time, Fisk comes across as intellectually curious, energetic, and courageous. Very well. These qualities are not necessarily contradictory. The same arrogance that can inspire somebody to write the only definitive history of the Lebanese civil war can, if given free reign, destroy good reporting.

The Khalifa article is not quite a profile -- perhaps it was pitched as a report on the Syrian censorship of "In Praise of Hatred" or a retrospective look at the violence between the Assad regime and the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1980s -- but Khalifa steals the show. Someone needs to write a profile of this guy. On why he started writing for television: “I needed a way to pay for alcohol."

At the same time, Khalifa has made his peace with making the compromises necessary in order to continue living in Syria. He is not an exile who comes out with all guns blazing against Syria's censorship of his work; he makes jokes about it, and even is a little peeved over Western moralizing over freedom of expression. How can Khalifa simultaneously possess the towering ambition to be a great author that Worth ascribes to him, and also make flippant jokes about the banning of the book which consumed 13 years of his life? That, at least, is the question I am left with. Maybe it will be answered in the next profile.