By Laila Lalami. A conquistador leads a party of 600 into present-day Florida. A decade later, four men from the expedition emerge in Mexico: three Spainards and a black Muslim. This is The Moor’s Account. If it is fiction, it is fiction truer than any American history I got in high school. It’s a story […]
Tag Archives: fiction
Review: Getting Filthy Rich
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia promises not to waste your time like the pompous gasbags of “foreign” literature such as Salman Rushdie. OK, Hamid doesn’t mention Rushdie by name, but I know that’s who he meant.
Review: Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie Could the Booker Prize have gone to a novel that treats three generations of an extended family but remains emotionally dead-flat aside from twin swellings of self-pity and self-love? Was a career launched by a book that contains 50 years of intricately plotted interconnections, parallels and synchronicities across the breadth of the […]
Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamed. Changez’s personal journey of transformation and the conflicts driving it were believable enough I guess, but not particularly dramatic or striking (and lacking almost entirely in fundamentalism). His critique of American society/empire was also fairly tepid. I suppose that’s where the “Reluctant” comes from in the title, but it made the novel […]