Because he approaches it with a certain reverence for the pulps and the hacks, for the cheapness of collections of Golden Age sci-fi space-ships-and-ray-guns imaginings, for the sadness of worlds that never were. Normally, it might rub me the wrong way, but because it's Tidhar, somehow, that makes it okay. Gorgeous in its alienness, comfortingly gray in its banality, and disquieting throughout.Īnd yes, it's a story about the magic of writers, partly, and that may rub some people the wrong way. Something that no one but Tidhar could've written. Dick and Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. There are echoes of Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union in it, wild strains of P.K. It has three narrators: Investigator Bloom, Tirosh and a woman, Nur, who works as a field agent for the Border Agency. This is a story that gets weirder the deeper you get into it that cultivates strangeness like something precious. When he takes his hand away from his ear, he finds he's been talking into a glasses case: No one in this place has a cell phone. He becomes one of his own characters, a detective searching for his missing niece.
Keep it reel npr full#
When he gets a cell phone call from his agent, it seems to come from a million miles away - full of pops and static. Tirosh's connections to the world outside Palestinia - his family, his past, his career as a novelist - become stretched and tenuous. Lavie Tidhar is a genius at conjuring realities that are just two steps to the left of our own - places that look and smell and feel real, if just a bit hauntingly alien.įrom there, the world begins to unspool.
He's surprised by an old friend from school who asks him to find a niece that he barely recalls.
He knows, in some vague way, that there have been some troubles in Palestinia, but on his first night in Ararat, the capital, he witnesses a suicide bombing. The security checkpoints at the airport, the intense scrutiny of him and his things. The giant wall that's being built to keep out African immigrants is new. He remembers the sights, the smells, the polyglot languages and the giraffes snarling traffic at red lights. And when he lands in Palestinia - the Jewish homeland on the Ugandan border, offered to Europe's Jews in 1904 as a place of safety - he feels like, finally, he has come home. He's fleeing from a tragedy in his own life, grieving as the miles unwind behind him. He is an author of pulp detective novels, not particularly famous, not particularly loved. Lior Tirosh is pretty sure that there's only one world when he boards a plane from Berlin, meaning to go home to visit his ailing father. How sure are you that you're not living in one of them right now? How sure are you that it's the only one? That there aren't other, stranger, worse or better worlds existing simultaneously, right next door, a breath away? How sure are you that the world you see around you every day is real? Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Unholy Land Author Lavie Tidhar
0 kommentar(er)
