| Title | : | Osama |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1848631928 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781848631922 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 276 |
| Publication | : | First published September 21, 2011 |
| Awards | : | World Fantasy Award Best Novel (2012), British Science Fiction Association Award Novel (2011), The Kitschies Red Tentacle (Novel) (2011) |
“In a world without global terrorism Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante...”
“Joe’s quest to find the man takes him across the world, from the backwaters of Asia to the European Capitals of Paris and London, and as the mystery deepens around him there is one question he is trying hard not to ask: who is he, really, and how much of the books is fiction? Chased by unknown assailants, Joe’s identity slowly fragments as he discovers the shadowy world of the refugees, ghostly entities haunting the world in which he lives. Where do they come from? And what do they want? Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he’ll find in New York and, finally, on top a quiet hill above Kabul—nor for the choice he will at last have to make...
Osama Reviews
-
Osama is one of those novels that keep on surprising me long into the reading. It FEELS like a noir with some really cool easter eggs. What sets this one apart from most noirs is the fact that this is in an alternate dimension.
Coolness already. But when we're dealing with an easter egg like an enigmatic novel named Osama, based on a revolutionary vigilante hero Osama Bin Laden, things get... weird.
Never too weird or too quick, this mystery only gets deeper and stranger when we dive into the worldbuilding. Fascinating, in-depth worldbuilding. Rather obscure turning points in history, deeper explorations of culture, and here's a really good tidbit: Vigilante justice conventions. You know. Like comic-cons, with panels, guest stars, discussions, but all about real-life vigilantes. Like Osama, who is a hero here.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
But most of this novel takes place in England! It's freaky! Disturbing. Very reminiscent of Man in the High Castle. But in some ways, it's BETTER than PKD's novel. It has more to say, better pacing, and a super-addictive noir style for all you mystery fans.
Of course, when we start bleeding into another universe... all bets are off. Things get very interesting indeed.
Hello, world. :)
I'm quite impressed with this novel. Lots of food for thought. -
I discovered Lavie Tidhar’s work a year or two ago, and I have been making my way through his catalogue since, loving every minute of it. Granted, I am not reading his books in the chronological order in which they were published, and it gave me a few surprised. Such as “Osama”, the book that made Tidhar’s name by wining him the World Fantasy Award when it was finally published, leaving a few better known writers to eat his dust and wonder what had just happened.
I was 17 when the planes hit the Twin Towers, so I would really struggle to imagine a world without 9/11 having happened: it’s been a thing that people have talked about literally my entire adult life. I have also never had close-brushes with terrorist acts (contrary to what suburbanites might think, Montreal is pretty darn safe) but Tidhar has, and it clearly got him thinking about what kind of world we would be living in if such acts of aggressions were not a part of our collective past and trauma.
A chain-smoking, whiskey swilling private detective named Joe is hired by a dame (of course) to find the author behind the pen name Mike Longshott; this man makes a living penning a series of books about Osama Bin Laden, vigilante. Joe follows the clues to Paris, London and eventually New York, unearthing an increasingly strange story, and even stranger possibilities about the world.
A lot of reviewers have made the comparison to Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle”, but I actually think that for all his books, Tidhar’s “Unholy Land” is the one that felt closer to PDK’s alternate WWII novel in terms of subversive ideas. That said, it would be a mistake to dismiss “Osama”: the speculative exercise is not only interesting, but important. So much of history hinges on small moments that probably don’t feel like big deals at the time. And this book is a less structured novel than “Unholy Land”, it is more of a tongue-and-cheek reflection on what the world could be like if only slight changes were made to our history, to our way of living and thinking. With literary and pop culture references sprinkled all over the place to make you smile. Or cringe. Or both.
A few things that are consistent through all of Tidhar’s works: he thinks life in books is infinitely more exciting than life in the real world, he is immensely well-read, has a tendency for self-referential humour and he is clever – and yes, probably more so than you. If that’s the sort of thing you enjoy, and if you like to chew on what is written between the lines, he won’t disappoint. Did I also mention that he writes in ingenious and beautiful prose? I see the world he builds as I read the page, and I am just giddy to get lost in it, even when its bleak and weird and dangerous. And forgive me for saying so, but its definitely better prose than PDK’s…
Not my favorite of his – as I can see it being an earlier work than his books I liked better, but nevertheless fun and thought-provoking, as everything he writes! -
Osama was the surprise winner of the 2012 World Fantasy award for best novel beating out both Stephen King and George R.R. Martin. Its premise involves a quest to find the writer of a series of pulp thrillers featuring a vigilante named Osama Bin-Laden. In Tidhar's alternate reality tale, we have a world in which there is no war on terror and no World Trade Center. Joe (just Joe) is a private investigator hired by a mysterious woman (Is there any other kind in this type of story?) to search and find the creator of the fictional Osama, Mike Longshott. The story starts out with all the qualities expected of a crime noir novel a la Chandler or Hammett. But Lavie Tidhar's style of writing doesn't allow for that type of formula for long. Osama is more like a Phillip K. Dick novel, especially The Man in The High Castle, yet even here the reader finds something else is going on. It is to Tidhar's credit that Osama is hard to place in any type of category. What starts out as a typical detective thriller turns into a literary chess game in which Joe is asked, usually between getting beat up, if he is a "refugee" or is told to look for "Fuzzie Wuzzies". After a series of bizarre and entertaining turns, Joe's task, and actually his world, becomes like nothing he ever expected. I like where Tidhar leads me . Yet somewhere near the end it becomes purposely vague. Normally I would like that sort of thing but the author's lead-in demands answers we never receive or at least assumptions that are better rewarded. Osama is certainly no The Man in the High Castle. Yet it is an original novel that deserved its award and is deserving of more attention from those who love science fiction and fantasy. Three and a half stars.
-
Wishing Terrorism Was Only Fiction
Many people have compared the novel Osama by Lavie Tidhar to books by Phillip K. Dick. It is similar in that the main characters come to realize that reality is not at all what it seems, and that there are those who would stop them from learning the truth. However, Osama is much more beautifully written, and without the heightened paranoia of many of Dick’s works.
This is not a difficult book to read, but it is a very difficult book to discuss. I finished it over a month ago and I am still trying to articulate my response.
It starts out simply enough. The first couple of short chapters are beautifully atmospheric. We see Joe, a loner, having his morning coffee, watching the sky and the people in Vientiane, Laos. But this is an alternate Laos, in a more peaceful, less technologically advanced world. A world without global terrorism. Here Osama bin Laden is just the hero of a series of violent pulp novels which Joe enjoys reading in his downtime.
At first Joe seems like a cliché private detective, complete with an anonymous office and bottle of booze in the drawer. A mysterious woman literally appears in Joe’s office and hires him to find Mike Longshott, the writer of the Osama bin Laden:Vigilante books. She presents him with a strange black card that provides a seemingly inexhaustible supply of credit.
Joe begins a quest that leads him from Laos to Paris, London and New York, pursued by some “men in black” types. So far, so typical… but as Joe drinks and smokes his way across continents, following clues, noir-detective style, his sense of identity and purpose begin to unravel.
First Joe finds himself falling in love with the mysterious woman who hired him, and is nagged by the sense that he knows her from somewhere. He also comes to realize that his world, inhabited by insubstantial “refugees,” may not be the only world. The reader realizes that the men in black, in fact, may be from our world.
In Osama, like classic detective fiction, the unanswered questions draw us in and lead us along. Who is the woman who hired Joe? Who or what are the refuges? Who is after Joe and why? And what is the real identity of Mike Longshott? But this book goes far beyond detective motifs, into uncharted waters.
As the narrator comes apart, the reader, too, experiences dislocating shifts while reading the passages that are presumably from the Vigilante novels. This is because the excerpts presented from the “novels within the novel” are not pulp fiction at all, but our reality. They are written like news reports — flat and factual, sometimes using lists — and describe the terrorist attacks at Dar-es-Salaam, Sharm el-Sheikh, the 7/7 London bombings, and others, as well as the actions and (from an omniscient point of view) the thoughts of the terrorists.
As John H. Stevens astutely noted in his excellent review, “Tidhar is not writing about our angst or a sense of postmodern slippage so much as he is demonstrating that reality is plotted and that our identities are constructed to make sense of the world around us.” In other words, when reality is too horrible to comprehend, the mind will do what it must to protect the psyche.
The facts of terrorist acts are presented without melodrama. The terrorists are presented as humans, too: on a mission to destroy that which they perceive is out to destroy them.
This is dangerous territory for a novelist, but Tidhar handles it with great finesse. I found his portrayals to be moving and completely free of jingoism. He lets the events speak for themselves: they are shocking enough. Sensationalism, such as we see so often in the media, only cheapens the truth.
This world of violence and the unending “war against terror” that kills innocents in retaliation for the killing of innocents should, by any moral compass, be the stuff of pulp fiction. Instead, it is our reality.
The list-style is used again in a couple of powerful passages toward the end of the novel. One where the mystery woman reveals all that she knows about Joe: a desperate, emotional plea in which Joe’s choice is made clear.
In the other, we get unexpected, fragmented litany of first person narratives by terrorist victims, expressing the bewilderment, shock and grief of experiences that are only half-understood, half-remembered.
Though the language is beautiful and the concepts are powerful, it is difficult to connect with Joe, because he has no interest in connecting with himself. The ending, for this reason, was a bit of a let down for me. But on the other hand, I have to acknowledge the validity of the author’s choice here, for it reflects a reality that we face when confronted by horror: to attempt to make sense of insanity, or to take refuge in comforting lies.
Novelist Lavie Tidhar has had more than his share of brushes with terrorism. In 1998 he was in Dar-es-Salaam during the American embassy bombing. He stayed in the same hostel as the Al-Qaeda operatives in Nairobi, and “narrowly avoided both the 2005 King’s Cross and 2004 Sinai attacks.” -
Novelón de Tidhar. Primero que leo, y no el último.
Con un inicio que explota los clichés detectivescos hasta la náusea, explora ideas que estremecen, y expone ideas sobre el terrorismo y política de una manera muy peculiar.
Si bien es cierto que su estilo puede hacer que algunas mentes se pierdan un poco (el final me costó un poco), la veo muy recomendable para aquellas personas que buscan historias poco usuales, donde no se exponen los hechos de forma nítida y dejan mucho a la interpretación, donde la trama se desarrolla de manera orgánica, creciendo ante los ojos del lector.
Y para aquellos con ganas de gresca, claro. Tidhar es provocativo a su manera. -
What I really dug about this book was the sense of diminishment it left me with: the diminishment of Osama as a man; the diminishment of Osama as an idea; the diminishment of the attack on the WTC; the diminishment of terrorism in general; the diminishment of the US government and its war machine; the diminishment of violence and our rationalized motivations for violence; the diminishment of humanity; the diminishment of our own little tragedies. And it did this while celebrating knowledge and love.
It told its strange tale of afterlife in a string of pseudo-short stories that massed together into a novel, all with some wonderful imagery. Yet it was littered with similes that began to smell like trash in a steaming, tropical landfill (exactly!). It was interesting, but I could put it down and forget about it for days. I wanted it to be better. It could have been so much worse. I think I'd rather read the novels in the novel than what we were given as the novel itself. And I wish I cared more. -
This is the book that won the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, beating out four other finalists, including my own first effort, Those Across the River. If only the rest of life's small disappointments seemed so just. Mine is a horror novel, and, I think, a good one-but this? Osama is a fable, an opium dream, a prose-poem, a meaningful contemplation on life's fragility and the absurdity of violence, containing perhaps the best articulation of Purgatory I have ever read. My favorite detail? "...a picture on the wall of former French President Saint-Exupéry against a blue background..." Lavie Tidhar has given us, among other things, an alternate Paris in which the author of The Little Prince became his nation's leader instead of dying in a plane crash. Just let the delicious contextual implications echo for a moment, and then seek out this exquisite, multi-layered book.
-
I've been avoiding reading Osama for a while, as I didn't really feel tempted by the summary, but I ended up picking it up in the library -- because that can never hurt! -- and really enjoying it, as it happens. Rather more than the books that Lavie Tidhar wrote for Angry Robot, actually, even though superficially they might seem more up my street.
I think a fair amount of the trouble people have reading this is that they're expecting the wrong thing. A classically noirish detective story, a thriller, something solidly science fictional that deals with multiverses... but it's none of those things, or not only those things. It borrows some of the trappings of each: the protagonist is a detective in a classic noir style; there are excerpts that're meant to be from a thriller; there are at least two parallel universes, it seems...
Going into this as I did, without too many expectations, let me enjoy it a lot. Each chapter is short, so it ended up flying by, and while others complained about the metaphors and imagery, I actually enjoyed it a lot. Borrowing from a genre that gave us "shop-worn Galahad"s and the like, I don't think the writing style was out of place at all.
It's much more quiet, meditative, than most noir-ish things, though. Although the character is in many ways insubstantial, that's kind of the point. If you're looking for a thriller, this ain't it: though there's plenty of violence and mystery and so on, really it's more about an internal journey. -
Detective noir with comic book flavor, hints of alternate worlds, a vein of historical journalism, and light, heart-tugging sentimentality. Better than any prime time comic news show, Tidhar brilliantly conveys just how ridiculous and pulpy our tragic violence might appear to a world without the GWoT, while at the same time levelling blame at the proper parties. Bravo!
-
I thought that this wonderful novel about our identities in this world will be more like The Man in the High Castle and less like Ubik, but it is the other way around and I like it. And fortunately, the writing is so much better than anything Philip K. Dick ever put on paper.
-
It galls me to write this, because Lavie's a friend and frankly is unlikely to let me hear the end of it, but this is a seriously good book. Beautifully written, spare but not short or lightweight as I find some novels of this ilk are. It's an unsettling story reminiscent Paul Auster, but with substance in the place of narcissism. The PKD similarity is clear, but I was also put in mind of The City and the City; the ending of which I found a massive disappointment. Osama didn't disappoint and I think it will stay with me for a long time.
-
Este libro en realidad requiere dos valoraciones. El estilo es absolutamente fascinante, creando una atmósfera envolvente, pero la historia en si no me ha llegado y el giro final ya está muy visto.
-
"Mi piace il colore del whisky quando il cubetto di ghiaccio inizia a sciogliersi nel bicchiere. Quando metti il bicchiere sotto la luce e osservi il drink dal basso, ed è come il cielo subito dopo la pioggia".
Tutto parte, come se fosse un film, in un anonimo studio di un investigatore privato, il suo nome è Joe (non conosciamo il cognome), dove si presenta una donna che lo incarica, lasciandogli anche la propria carta di credito per tutte le spese, di rintracciare Mike Longshott, autore del libro bestseller del momento. Il protagonista del libro è un certo "Osama Bin Laden"... forse un terrorista, forse un liberatore. E da qui si capisce che, nel mondo di Joe, non c'è mai stato un 11 settembre, non esiste Osama Bin Laden e non ci sono mai stati alcuni fatti storici grondanti sangue.
Da qui in poi, per Joe è tutto uno spostarsi in giro per il mondo (Vientiane, Parigi, Londra, New York, Kabul) alla ricerca sia del fantomatico Mike Longshott che, lo scopriremo strada facendo, della stessa realtà alternativa da cui provengono tutti i protagonisti, principali e secondari, del romanzo.
Che dire in poche parole…? In questa storia ucronica si fondono molto bene diversi generi letterari: giallo, spy, thriller, storia, fantascienza e viaggi in mondi alternativi. La narrazione scorre abbastanza fluida, anche se (in alcuni punti) rallenta moltissimo e, soprattutto, tra le sue pagine aleggia una sorta di "già letto o visto" in altri romanzi e film… e penso subito al più famoso "
La svastica sul sole" di Philip K. Dick.
[
https://www.antoniorosato.net/indice-...] -
Spoilers, yo.
The deliberate internet contrarians who are starting to pop up notwithstanding, I think the comparisons to The Man in the High Castle you see in many of the reviews here are dead on.
Joe's reality at the beginning of the book has simply unraveled by the end of it, and if that ain't Dickian, I don't know what is.
I enjoyed Osama more than I enjoy most of PKD's fiction, and the reason is interesting to me. Dick, for all the gobsmacking he does, for all the times when he turns the reader's expectations upside-down in the span of one paragraph, was quite ordinary in plot and in characterization. You might well then say that this sets up the greater contrast for him, and I wouldn't argue, but the fact is his characters are boring. They have boring jobs, they're married to boring wives, they live in boring places.
Well, not so Joe. He's a deadpan drinkin' 'n' smokin' gumshoe in Laos. How about that for exotic? How about that for coolness? It's as if Dick had written his Deckard in the way that the movie did. I've been obsessed with cool ever since I learned how to behave and affect my way out of being the grade school nerd; of course I wanna read about Joe. Shit, I'd love to be Joe. Cheap suit, bottle of Johnny Walker in the top drawer of the dusty desk, and always two packs of smokes at hand, in case you empty the first one.
Of course, there's somebody else who deep down wanted to be Joe, and that's the ur-Joe, the Joe that existed before he became a refugee, or fuzzy-wuzzy. And Tidhar wants the reader to think about that well.
Sure, you've got the gradual unmooring of reality. Sure, you've got the pain of these clinically-described terrorist acts, but Osama is also a rumination on how we'd--most of us--love to re-write ourselves in response to social and literary tropes.
There's another book with the word "Castle" in its title that comes to mind when considering Osama, and that's Lord Valentine's Castle. Silverberg's book begins as the once and future Coronal ascends an overlook. We the reader know nothing more, and neither does the character. He has had the entirety of his life ripped away from him by an act of war, and like Osama, the rest of LVC is concerned with the discovery by the main character that the life he is living is on every level a fabrication.
The only thing is, Valentine, when confronted by the facts, chooses to resume his earlier life. Silverberg's book is heroic fantasy, and what else would a hero do? Full of duty, he (at times reluctantly) reassumes the mantle of kingship, and goes back to who he had been.
But Joe's no hero, and neither are most of the rest of us. At the end of the book, Joe is literally slapped into recognition of his former life by the woman whom he had loved, and still--STILL--he refuses to go back. He'd rather continue playing the hardboiled detective in the tropical paradise.
Of course there are other things going on. Joe's wife was murdered in ways both brutal and clinical, and that's a pain he'd have had to deal with every day for the rest of his life had he chosen a return.
Yet it remains that Joe took the easy and lazy path. He uncovered the truth and ignored it, and I can only assume it was because he liked the fantasy life--the cardboard fantasy character he was playing--better.
You see criticism of Tidhar's characterization in Osama here and there. I find that interesting because his Central Station stories are almost exclusively focused on character, at least given their particular exotic milieu. So, what? Did Tidhar forget his characterization skills for Osama?
Not likely. Instead, I'm sure that he wrote to pulp trope to serve a purpose, to highlight an uncomfortable truth about us: that we'd play a fantasy role, even a stock one, rather than inhabit the well-rounded, if mundane, one we are all heir to. -
Joe, a 40-something chain-smoking, hard-drinking private detective in provincial Vientiane in southeast Asia, is visited at his office by a mysterious woman, who hires him to find the author of a series of pulp novels about a terrorist vigilante, Osama bin Laden, and the truth lying behind them. Osama, as it turns out, has gained quite a cult following: in a world without war or global terrorism, where opium is legally smoked everywhere, a terrorist who blows up embassies and tube stations and crashes airplanes into government buildings and world trade centres is as intriguing as they come.
The visit sets Joe on a global quest for Osama and his author that spans cities across several continents, but perhaps most importantly, puts Joe on an internal quest in order to find out who he really is... since there is obviously something very wrong with both his idea about himself and his version of the world.
The truth is easily gleaned out in the early sections of the novel, yet this does not subvert, in any way, the pleasure of the reading or the anticipation of what will be uncovered next. The most powerful and moving part comes at the very end of the novel, in the tales of loss and bereavement of Osama’s victims, as they make the crossing into Joe’s world (or realm or whatever it is, since Tidhar never considers it important enough to clarify).
There is not much that actually ‘happens’ in the novel: Tidhar’s strength seems to lie in painting the background rather than in fleshing out the plot. However, the lyrical, Bradburian style of writing, the gripping, fully-formed characters and Joe's own, slightly diabolical descent into madness as he uncovers the terrible truth more than make up for the static storyline. Quite curiously, the novel is inspired by Tidhar's own accidental brushings with Al-Qaeda, as he was practically present at several of Osama’s terrorist acts. Winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award. -
Absolutely brilliant book, best experienced in its audio format read by Jeff Harding, and an excellent example of why it's so important to seek out works written by non-US authors, particularly when delving into events in which the US has played a pivotal role.
The book blurb emphasizes the author's close scrapes with terrorism in Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam and London, as if this makes him uniquely qualified to write a novel about the War on Terror. But it seems to me his early life in Israel (where he was born) and nomadic adult life (including periods living in South Africa, Laos and Vanuatu, if Wikipedia is to be believed) has been a bigger influence on his view of the world in which such a war has been unleashed and the ways in which people understand the nature of the conflict.
The novel plunges us immediately into a noir world where sentences are short, life is cheap, and everyone smokes. The main character, a private detective we only know as "Joe" is sitting in his office when a mysterious, beautiful woman enters. Anyone who has ever seen "The Maltese Falcon" knows exactly how this scene looks and sounds.
The woman sets Joe on a quest to find the author of a series of books called "Osama bin Laden, Vigilante," and we soon figure out that in Joe's world, there is no terrorism and no al Qaeda. There is only a series of very popular pulp novels written by the elusive Mike Longshott describing bombings, coups, and other terrorist acts. The terrorist acts are easily recognized by the reader as real things that have happened, such as the shoe bomber Richard Reid, and the 9/11 attack. But it's interesting to note that Tidhar also mentions a couple of non-al Qaeda events, such as the violent 1973 Chilean coup in which the US was heavily involved (and for which both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger have been widely labeled as terrorists in the eyes of many in the international human rights community).
I would say more about the plot, which is convoluted and incredibly imaginative, but I fear giving too much away. This is a novel best experienced without knowing too much ahead of time. I will say there were many times when the writing--which is deceptively simple--made me stop cold and re-listen, it was so good.
"A couple was walking hand in hand and the girl wore a summer dress, though it was not yet summer. And when she turned her head for just a moment, he thought about his client, the woman who had hired him. And he thought something he couldn't put into words, but which hurt, and he turned away from the couple."
"The cliffs of Dover, chalky and pale, were being left behind, their faces, many now, staring out across the sea. Joe stared back through the window. Inside it was warm and the humidity fogged up the windows and he had to wipe the pane with his sleeve. He pressed his face to the glass, which was cool against his skin, and peered out. he wondered what the faces of Dover saw when they gazed out to sea. Across the channel, the poppies grew, somewhere there beyond the water, in the French landscape he had so recently passed through. He pictured a field of poppies growing where beneath, a field of humans had been sowed and reaped. The train gathered momentum, but for a long time, Joe's face remained glued to the glass, staring out beyond the gentle English moonlit landscape sprayed with silver rain, seeing as if through a fine haze, endless red flowers blossoming across the silent world."
Blatantly riffing off Casablanca while echoing Bolaño's 2666, Osama asks us to think about what is real and what is imagined, the choices we make and what we decide to remember. I know I will remember this book for a very long time. -
*review first appeared at skullsaladreviews.blogspot.com*
In the interest of full disclosure, I admit Lavie's someone I know and interact with online. I received an electronic review copy straight from the author himself. That said, Tidhar's new novel, Osama (PS Publishing, 2011), is a difficult novel to review without spoilers. I will do my best here. But let me just say upfront that I loved, loved this book! Sometimes when getting a book from a friend or acquaintance, there's a hesitance to review it because of the risk of hurting feelings. There was no need to hesitate reviewing this one.
On a superficial level, at least through roughly two-thirds of the novel, the story is pretty simple to explain. It is about a private investigator named Joe living in an alternative present where 9/11 and The War on Terrorism are the stuff of pulp novels. Osama bin Laden is a popular character in a series of cheap paperback thrillers detailing the lives of terrorists by an author named Mike Longshott. When removed from reality, the exploits of the terrorists make for entertaining reads in this alternative history. There are even conventions dedicated to Longshott and his Osama novels. People dress up like Osama and terrorists at these conventions and have roundtable discussions concerning the social relevance of these novels, much like at a Trekkie convention. The fictional acts of terrorism are all entertainment, nothing to fear.
Joe's story itself reads much like a paperback thriller. He's a hard-drinking, smoking private investigator searching through the seedy underworlds of Europe. Joe is hired to track down Longshott and travels around the world looking to uncover this author. In the process, he starts to learn a thing or two about himself.
The last third of the book is full of revelations. Our reality and Joe's alternate reality collide and the text grows increasingly slipstream and surreal. I won't say anymore about plot because I don't want to spoil the experience for anyone. The less one knows going into this novel, the more they will enjoy it, I believe.
Ultimately, this is a novel about identity, a novel which reflects a reality of the modern age in which we live. We choose our identities in many aspects of modern life – whether it be through a pen name as a writer, the personas we take on in differing social situations, or through online handles and avatars. As one character states in the novel:
"'You have to choose what to be. When you've been stripped of everything; a
name, a face, a love – you could be anything. You could even choose to be
yourself.'"
A wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking book – My six pack rating: 6 out of 6 Trader Joe's Vienna Style Lager -
This is an interesting reaction to current events, digging down to mess about in the collective unconscious. There are some striking moments - the interstitial chapters describing terrorists balance journalistic precision with a poetic eye for detail and Joe's imprisonment by the mysterious CPD is rich with irony, taking the Man in the High Castle elements to a new level.
I'd rate this one a 3 1/2 - I would like to have rated this thoughtful book higher, but some elements didn't quite gel for me. In particular, the private eye vernacular was laid on a bit too thick for my liking, especially in the beginning.
On the whole it had an alienating effect making it difficult to get interested in Joe, and these elements are, sorry to say, a little hackneyed. One needs to work a little harder to say something new about them. They were also built mainly on movies - Casablanca and Chinatown in particular - and I'd like to have seen a more literary frame of reference.
However, it's not a long book, so none of these elements had a chance to hang around long. It has a great atmosphere and the generic elements - as much as I moan about them - do a lot to put the terrorism theme in an insightful historical context. -
I really liked this book. It completely sucked me in. I read the last half in a single sitting.
And, frankly, I have no idea what I just read. Maybe there's a part of me that doesn't grok the big picture metaphors going on in books (and it's why I hate critical literature) but I've been sitting here for an hour after I finished this book, and I still don't know what the hell happened.
But I do know I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Go figure.
And "Mike Longshott" is a GREAT pseudonym for a purveyor of "terrorism porn." Just saying. -
Самая бесполезная книга в моей коллекции. Весь сюжет уместится в паре предложений, а все прочее — сигареты, кофе, виски, опиум. Если быть точным, то сигареты упоминаются 119 раз, а кофе 73 раза в 350 страницах. К этому добавьте дотошные до тошноты описания чемоданов на ленте выдачи багажа, перечисление стран, куда можно полететь из аэропорта, навязчивые воспоминания от встреч с персонажами третьего плана и получите книгу, которую лучше пропустить, потому что Тидхару нравится рассказывать про помидоры на прилавке, а не заморачиваться над логикой поступков персонажей и их мотивацией. Я не хочу объяснять призраков и эту тётку с прижатыми ушами, лучше посмотрите как классно я придумал — улыбка скрылась с лица, как будто упаковала вещи и уехала так далеко, что нескоро тут появится.
И, да, fanzon снова поел говна — ужасный перевод и отсутсвие примечаний (они объяснили суть зубной феи, но не расшифровали УДД), то есть ссылк�� на сноску есть, а саму сноску забыли. -
A very ambitious novel that escaped me in the end. Borrowing from cliched noir detective fiction and mixing liberally with alternate history and a lot of opium, Tidhar gives us quite the inventive and meditative novel on terrorism and escapism. I suspected something of the premise early on, but Osama really dives into it by the end.
-
This novel's actually between a 7 and an 8 out of 10 for me (as rated on my blog). I've given it 4 on GoodReads... I nearly didn't give it any stars at all - not because it doesn't deserve them, but because I can't make up my mind about it.
It's an interesting, enigmatic, Noir-ish novel which is beautifully written. It reminded me a lot of some novels by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, particularly End of the World Blues (for some reason). At its most basic, it's an alternate history novel about a series of alternate history novels. And it gets very Inception- and dreamlike at times.
The central character, the only character we really get to know, is Joe, a detective who travels from Vietnam to Paris and London and New York and who-knows-where in search of the author of a series of pulp novels about the fictional vigilante Osama Bin Laden. Bits of these novels are interspersed throughout the story, and they describe very recognisable events of terrorism from our recent history, which never took place in the world that Osama is set in.
I said we get to know Joe... But we don't. We learn how he thinks, but we don't really know anything about his background and sometimes it's not clear why he does or thinks particular things. That's not a failure in characterisation though - it's something which adds to the mysteries in this book.
I think what I most liked about it was the subtle world-building. The differences between Joe's world and ours are subtle at first. He seems to live in an earlier time (well, sometime, anytime between the forties and seventies) where everyone smokes everywhere all the time, and credit cards are rare and unusual. There's a very fuzzy feeling to Joe's world - again, a deliberate thing. Even when he's moving through very detailed external geography (I loved the sense of place in this novel, particularly in the parts set in London), I still never felt as if Joe knew where he was going or where he was meant to be.
There were plenty of clever things in this novel. I especially enjoyed Joe's visit to a fan convention devoted to the Osama novels, and the interrogation which revealed the differences between our history and that of Joe's world. There were nods to Casablanca (which I could recognise even though I've never seen it!) and a very clever reference to Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose of Cairo, but not in a way that (for me anyway) detracted from the story. Opium plays an important part in this novel, and at times Joe's journey and the author's descriptions of it do feel like everything could be just an extended opium dream.
But for all the dreaming beauty of this novel, which carried me right through almost to the end, I had to mark it down because it didn't really deliver any concrete answers. We never really find out how the worlds were bleeding into each other - or if that was actually what was happening, despite an opium dream sequence. There were just too many mysteries - who was the woman who'd employed Joe in the first place; where were the refugees coming from?
The answers are sort of there, hinted at in lots of ways (including the Woody Allen reference) and maybe a second reading would make things clearer for me. But I finished the novel mostly feeling disappointed, as if I'd been eating a delicious, beautifully presented meal which left me still hungry at the end.
Don't let that put you off reading it though. This is one of those novels that's all about the journey, not the destination, and it's a clever working of an interesting concept. -
I am having the hardest time processing this book.
Basic plot?
Joe is a detective. He's living and working in Laos when a mysterious woman comes to him and asks him to find an author. Someone who is writing about a fictional vigilante named Osama bin Laden. Chances are, if you've gotten to my review, you already know that.
This world is an alternate reality (maybe). It's a very classic detective noir novel (maybe), with your typical cardboard cut out detective stereotype (maybe), and standard cardboard bad guys (maybe), and a standard mystery to be solved. Maybe.
It's about life and choices and difficulties and realities. Maybe. It's definitely written in a way that can be hard to grasp, hard to get into. This is not a character driven novel. This is a world driven novel. This is a reality driven novel.
I will say that this is a book that needs to be read in one or two sittings. This book needs quiet, it needs contemplation, it needs focus, it needs thought. I was trying to read it in my usual 20 minute gulps on the bus, but things would get so convoluted I'd have to backtrack several pages to re-read and figure my way back into the story. So I quit, read something fluffy on the bus and waited for the one day when I could just focus, breathe, and read.
I think Lavie Tidhar is a very interesting, and maybe, amazing author. He plays with the language and sentence structure in a way that I notice, and it upsets my processing, the way the world in the novel changes and upsets my processing. He ties the writing in with the story, and I have not seen that done successfully (for me) very often. Bravo.
He gets an A-plus-plus for making an amazingly atmospheric novel, something I expect from a World Fantasy Award.
I think he could have been a little less heavy handed. I felt that the novel was very deliberate, but I also feel like it was a bit too heavy handed. Some things didn't need to be subtle, but I could have lived without a few anvils.
But I'm still not sure what the hell to think of this one. It's uncomfortable, and I'm pretty sure it was written to be that way. This book is not clean, it's not tidy, it's not wrapped in a beautiful little package that will let you not think/stop thinking and walk away.
And some of it is painful, and some of it is cute, and I believe absolutely all of it was very deliberate. And very well done. But I don't know what star rating I should give this book, because while I believe it to be a "good" book, and I believe the writing to be awesome. I'm not sure I "liked" it at all. -
Now and again you stumble across a book so captivating that (a) you wonder why on earth it took you so long to find it, (b) you wonder why you finished it so soon, because now it is over, and (c) you just have to tell all your friends, and anyone who would listen, that they just have to read this. This is all three of those, and then some.
The surprise winner of the World Fantasy Award, beating A Dance of Dragons by George R.R. Martin and 11/22/63 by Stephen King, this might seem more of an SF novel than fantasy, dealing with the so-called Osamaverse, an alternate reality or pocket universe where Osama Bin Laden is a character in a sequence of airport thrillers (pun very much intended).
However, Lavie Tidhar knows his genre tropes inside out (and through several dimensions), and spins a beautifully liminal and intensely descriptive tale that reads like Raymond Chandler crossed with PKD, with a smidgeon of William Burroughs eccentricity thrown in for good measure.
The novel plunges you unwittingly into the sweaty prose of a Mike Longshott pulp noir, leaving you gritting your teeth, wondering if the entire thing is going to be this bad ... then Tidhar switches gears into high lyricist mode, and you sit back and relax, knowing you are in the hands of a master, who has just pulled a rather neat confidence trick on his unsuspecting, and very admiring, reader.
Beautiful, extraordinary and provocative, as well as topical and timeless in turn, this is definitely one for my 'top novels' list, in any genre, any time, and in any universe. -
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1891438.html[return][return][return][return]An alternate history novel where the War on Terror never happened, but instead the history of our world is experience in a series of pulp novels about Osama Bin Laden; the plot concerns the central character's quest for the author of these stories, which takes him on a long journey including a brief step into our timeline. So it's basically The Man In The High Castle recast for today, though with lots of added literary allusions to the noir genre in particular. I wasn't completely satisfied; like a lot of alternate history stories, this seems very pleased with its own cleverness (perhaps in a slightly different way to most of them), and I found the low-key ending a but unsatisfying after such a convoluted journey. But Tidhar does hold a mirror up to the history of our own times and get a rather interesting reflection. I like this more than the other BSFA nominee I have read but hope I like others even better. -
Modernity, or post-modernity, or the difference, or whatever that thing we're in now is. Very precisely, very elegantly, theres an evocation of a stylized, graceful past, though the setting is nominally the present. A world of phone booths and opium dens, fedoras, travel agents, zippo lighters, Parisian cafes and London pubs populated by beautiful, sad eyed prostitutes where smoking indoors is always allowed. Cons where people still read mimeographed fanzines. Our world intrudes as a crude, pointless, painful, violent place, above all unbearably stupid. It's terrorism and the war thereon, but it's also seemingly ipods, porn and reality tv. The ambience is pre war, interwar, something, a distilled ambience of a place that still bears some dignity in the western collective imagination of the past, finally explicitely made so much fiction. Noir, detective stories, Casablanca. Fever dreams of trauma. Nice.
-
It reads like a detective crime thriller with lots of clouds mishmashed together, all beyond any recognition. There are clouds of conspiracy theories, America's many insurgency plots, opium bars, sleazy hotels and a bit of Afghanistan which seems alien to the whole story. I expected Osama to emerge fro New York instead of Kabul. Maybe its just me with my Muslim background who expected some serious treatment of the 'War against terror' which has turned out to be a completely one way as far as the West is concerned. Why is the the West behind this 'war', or better put, why is the West behind every war? Why can't some due credit given to Osama and his cronies for escalating the stakes in order to warrant huge attacks against Afghanistan and Iraq? Now that Osama is safely dead and his movements main enemies obliterated, can we at least present a factual story of events? Don't we owe that much to the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed on both sides?
-
This one starts off simply enough as a noir detective story with a private investigator hired to find the creator of the fictional character, Osama Bin Laden. However, those looking for a quick, mystery plot will be disappointed as the story quickly becomes a surreal journey as the main character struggles to understand how this fictional world, which is really our world, a world of terrorists, suicide bombers, and other things, can possibly exist. There are even suggestions that our world and the world of the novel are far more intertwined that we think. Not a book for everyone, but one worth checking out.
Being written on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Osama can also be considered a tribute to the victims of that terrible day. -
An interesting experiment, but a flawed one. The characters (such as they are) are intentionally cardboard cutouts, the action is purposefully repetitive, and the plot twist is telegraphed nearly from the start. But there's something of worth here, flipping history and science fiction to show the absurdity of a War on Terror.
The hardboiled prose and short chapters were agreeable even when the ham-handed cultural references weren't. (Look, it's Casablanca! The Wizard of Oz! Alice in Wonderland! Aren't I clever!) If dream logic, detectives and alternate history are your thing, you'll probably find things to enjoy. Or you could just read some Murakami. -
The book had a promising start but eventually it turned out to be a disappointment. It's like a noir novel set in a paralel universe where the protagonist, a private detective, is in search of Osama bin Laden, who exists only as a fictional character. Actually, it's the author of the Osama bin Laden novels that's the target of the investigation.
While the atmosphere and the dialogues are good, they are not good enough to save the book, provided that there is not much going on. Overall, it was a slow read for me, as I didn't find the plot line engaging enough.
