I finished Kader Abdolah’s The House of the Mosque on the same day that organised celebrations (and crackdowns on civil unrest) took place in Tehran to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution which swept Mohammad-Rez? Sh?h Pahlavi from power and led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Looking at the pictures [...]
There was virtually nothing I liked about Jim Dodge’s Fup when it arrived at my door. A blurb from the Independent on Sunday telling me ‘You’ll love it’, coupled with the sub-title ‘A modern fable’, had me close to shredding it with extreme prejudice.
Three things stopped me, though - the peculiarly grumpy looking duck on [...]
“If the general climate is bad, all will be affected by it. Men and women of letters are not expected to do more than they can, as they express this bad situation in their literary production. With respect to the question of the appeal of a particular work, the whole thing depends on whether the [...]
Though suffering a major nervous breakdown, Mark Haddon’s 57 year old protagonist George, in the novel A spot of bother has plenty of pragmatic insights. For example, casually while trying to fight off panic he finishes reading a novel (Sharpe’s Enemy by Bernard Cornwell), but chooses to turn on the t.v rather than start a [...]
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