Currently reading
The Collected Stories
Middlemarch
Omensetter's Luck
Swann's Way
A Naked Singularity (Paper)
The Master and Margarita
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
Infinite Jest
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Maps and Legends
The annual longlist of the Dublin Impac awards provides a rich source of titles from around the world that I would otherwise never hear of. That is how I came across this book which has since made it on to the short list. It is the tale of an Israeli secret service man who specializes in interrogation. He is just a guy, doing his job, protecting the good guys from the bad guys. And that's his justification for his willful blindness to the cruelties he helps perpetuate. But his marriage and interior life are crumbling, and we watch it happen in slow motion as he desperately tries to maintain his professional rigor in another assignment. We simultaneously want him to succeed because we can identify with his personal travails, but we also want him to fail because his objectives seem abhorrent. Israel and Cyprus are exotic settings to a Canadian. Good read. 3 1/2 ***.
