I have just read a wonderful narrative by the Palestinian human rights lawyer, activist, and now writer of the first rank, Raja Shehadeh. The author lives in Ramallah, in the West Bank, which has been under occupation by Israeli forces for 51 years and counting. The book, A Rift in Time: Travels … [Read more...]
Breaking the Code, and then Breaking the Spirit
Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms case, (Delwyn) Vriend v. Alberta. There was some fine reporting in the Edmonton Journal and elsewhere on the case, including where Delwyn Vriend is now and what his experiences have been in the struggle … [Read more...]
Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua: Acquiring False Identities At Great Psychic Cost
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 … [Read more...]
Orwell on Law, Order and Corruption in Burma
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 … [Read more...]
A Not Insignificant Death: The Grass is Singing
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 … [Read more...]
Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs
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 … [Read more...]
Mr. Green from The Company Brings Bloodshed to the Republic
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 … [Read more...]
1984 and None Turn Back: Two Timely Novels
George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, published less than a year before the English novelist and journalist’s untimely death in 1950, has had extraordinary staying power. Indeed, twice in recent times it has raced up the bestsellers lists, to the Number 1 position at Amazon in 2013 after the … [Read more...]
A Long Way From Plato
Canada is in the process of following the lead of other nations like Britain and Germany which have committed to pardoning and /or apologizing to large numbers of men who were criminally convicted in past decades for engaging in homosexual acts. The German government has determined that it will … [Read more...]
Stalin The Magician
I have been organizing a human rights film series for the past year, and leading discussions with the audience after the showing. For one of these discussions, I had with me (through Skype) the distinguished writer Stephen Heighton, and we talked about his novel Every Lost Country, set in Tibet and … [Read more...]
