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Ladataan... PureTekijä: Timothy Mo
   - Ei tämänhetkisiä Keskustelu-viestiketjuja tästä kirjasta.  ming.l | Mar 31, 2013 |   The novel consists of chapters narrated by the key characters: Snooky; Victor, a pompous Oxbridge professor and former British intelligence agent in Southeast Asia; Shakyh, the Pakistani mastermind of the Islamic school; and Umar, the school's spiritual leader, who secretly despises Shakyh and Pure is an interesting novel about the political history of Thailand and the rise of Islamic activity in southeast Asia. However, I found the novel to be overly clever and rather unfocused, one which would have benefitted from an experienced editor, which this book apparently didn't have. It has received rare reviews, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was selected for the upcoming Booker Prize longlist, but I would be disappointed if it did. (  )5  kidzdoc | Jul 8, 2012 | näyttää 2/2
 You should never judge a book by its disclaimer. Readers of Timothy Mo’s startling, typically eccentric Pure may be forgiven for putting it down unread when confronted by its first page: “this fiction is a distillation. About places and personages, dates and dialects, its principals have not always been exigent. None have any but an ideal existence in their own lucubrations.” It is hard to say quite how Pure is a distillation (or a lucubration, for that matter). It certainly does need some sort of disclaimer, though, as it tells the shocking story of how Snooky, a young Thai katoey (a ladyboy, in the cruel vernacular) becomes first a British-run spy, and then a brutally effective jihadist. For the last two decades, novelists in the west have suspected that the "necessary subject" (as Nadine Gordimer once described apartheid) is the rise of Islamist terrorism and the spread of Arab nationalism. Most English-writing authors, though, have concluded that they lacked either the background, languages or – after what happened to Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, a novel that seems increasingly prophetic – guts to tackle the topic. One exception is John le Carré, whose example Mo is possibly acknowledging by casting Pure in the form of a spy story. There are certainly echoes of Le Carré characters in Victor, an elderly Oxbridge don whose fictional Brecon College has numbered among its students many future Arab potentates and several spooks, including Victor himself. Surely, though, only Mo could have imagined the figure who alternates most of the novel's narration with Victor: Snooky, a 6ft-tall Thai lady boy and movie critic. A consistent joy of the book is Mo's voice – or rather, voices. The cascade of multilingual puns and pan-global cultural references nods to the work of Anthony Burgess, although that writer came to the far east as more of an outsider, and there is a frequent sense in Pure that Mo is setting down sentences that only he has the linguistic and cultural knowledge to write.  Just past the halfway mark in Timothy Mo's seventh novel, his heroine – a strapping Bangkok ladyboy who has joined a company of bloodthirsty Islamist warriors – wanders through a serene orchard on an island close to Singapore. Snooky's jihadi platoon (sanook = fun in Thai) has halted for a brief rest en route to help the insurgent Moros of the Philippines as fellow holy warriors. She (and for all the unwanted testosterone that jungle warfare brings, Snooky's chosen pronoun never wavers) samples the fruit of the ebony tree. It is not dark and dense like the wood, but pale, delicate and enigmatic: "tart and sweet in the same mouthful, soft but crunchy... If marzipan dormice grew on trees... they would taste like this". If this moment smacks of Eden, and forbidden fruit, it also helps initiate Snooky into the mysteries of the jihadi pursuit, where darkness yields to light, stark contradictions resolve themselves, and chaste perfection grows from the crooked timber of humanity. For any major novelist to write the modern jihad from inside takes balls (which this heroine, in every sense, never lacks). But to make our first-person guide to the lofty idealism and flint-hearted cruelty that fuse in the zealots' mission a street-smart, razor-tongued Thai katoey calls on a degree of chutzpah that limits the field to just about one. Mo brings all his audacity and exuberance – frivolity, even – to one of the grimmest topics in our cultural lexicon. If Chris Morris's holy-war burlesque in Four Lions comes to mind, so do the baroque battlefield tragi-comedies of a Heller or a Waugh.
Timothy Mo's first novel in a decade is set within the battle for secession in the Muslim regions of southern Thailand. Pure covers epic expanses of time and is told through narrators who range from fanatical zealots to decorated Oxbridge dons. Everything that Mo's readers expect abound in this long-awaited novel: versatile style, memorable characters, insight into those tormented by dual loyalties and the ability to handle the weightiest of themes with a light touch. By examining the cultural wars of the past and present, Pure's themes are among the most important of the day. Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt. |
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 Google Books — Ladataan...LajityypitMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Kongressin kirjaston luokitusArvio (tähdet)Keskiarvo: (3.88)
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structurally the book needed to be tightened up and there are times when a point seems drawn out longer. I learned a lot and I enjoyed it.
Mo does a very good post-colonial critique, showing the arrogance and ineptitude of the British. (