That Existential Leap: a crime story, was in production in September 2016, when Lionel Shriver caused a stir by launching a scathing attack at the Brisbane Writers Festival on the concept of cultural appropriation. In particular, she rejected the idea that writers should not write about characters from backgrounds different from their own, that it is exploitative, for example, for a white, male, British author to write from the point of view of a 14-year-old Nigerian girl. As a white, male, British author who wrote much of That Existential Leap from the point of view of a young American woman of Indian origin, I had to agree with Shriver. Continue reading “The ways they are like us all”
Tag: life writing
The Idiot, by Elif Batuman (Jonathan Cape 2017)
There is an old librarian joke about a little girl who returns a book to the library and complains that it told her more about penguins than she had wanted to know. Readers of Elif Batuman’s 2010 book The Possessed are likely to have put the book down feeling much the same about Uzbek literature. Continue reading “Did Anna die for nothing?”
Dolan Cummings 