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Hope And Other Dangerous Pursuits
I grabbed Laila Lalami's debut novel this afternoon, sat down at a restaurant overlooking a river here in the swamp and started reading. I can't remember the last time I was so captivated by a novel. I literally could not put it down.
It's the story of four people who meet each other on an over crowded raft trying to gain illegal entry into Spain from Morocco. Other than when they are each brought back to jail by the Spanish authorities, this is the only thing that they have in common. The book follows their separate lives and how this attempt changed each of them. Because of this, the novel reads like a series of short stories.
Lalami's prose is tight and spare, with no wasted words. It would be easy to describe the language as simple, but this would be to deny the extraordinary way that she uses this simple language to develop characters who, for a time, became as real to me as the people at the table adjacent to mine. Similarly, modern day Morocco, with its inherent corruption and crushing poverty is described so well that I could feel the grit despite the oppressive mugginess of the day. As a wannabe writer, I kept marvelling at the way she uses language and kept saying to myself, "this is the way I'd like to write."
I'd highly recommend this book.
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To identify the elements of style, perhaps we should begin by eliminating the idea of correctness.
- Mario Vargas Llosa
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