Sayed Kashua wrote his novel, Second Person Singular, as an Arab-Israeli. He has since sadly reflected on his need to leave Israel for the US, after years of trying to find a place for himself in a society that treated him and other Palestinians as second-class participants in a country dominated by hard- right, nationalistic […]
About Rob Normey
Rob Normey is a lawyer who has practised in Edmonton for many years and is a long-standing member of several human rights organizations.
Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua: Acquiring False Identities At Great Psychic Cost
March 6, 2018 By Rob Normey
Orwell on Law, Order and Corruption in Burma
January 5, 2018 By Rob Normey
George Orwell was an outstanding man of letters who is also quite likely the most influential political novelist of the 20th century. Best known for his satiric animal fable Animal Farm, and the dystopian novel 1984, he began his career as an unlikely candidate for literary stardom. His first novel, Burmese Days (1934), reveals his […]
A Not Insignificant Death: The Grass is Singing
November 1, 2017 By Rob Normey
Doris Lessing left Africa – Southern Rhodesia to be precise, to journey by ship to England with the most meagre of personal possessions – a suitcase, a small sum of money and a manuscript. It was the manuscript which would transform the life of this fearless colonial from the margins of the fast-changing British Empire. […]
Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs
September 8, 2017 By Rob Normey
Leonardo Padura is a Cuban novelist, known first and foremost as one of the most exciting crime novelists of our time. In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Padura presents us with an epic, Tolstoyan novel that mostly succeeds in the ambitious goals he has set for the work. This year marks the 100th anniversary of […]
Mr. Green from The Company Brings Bloodshed to the Republic
July 5, 2017 By Rob Normey
George Orwell famously sought to make writing on politics into an art. It’s important to remember that he wasn’t the only one. So too did a radically different kind of writer, the cocksure American Gore Vidal. I bring up Orwell because I continue to ponder the notion that his dystopian novel 1984 time and again […]
