|
|
|
|
|
|
HomeShop at BookSurgeBusiness & EconomicsCareersGeneralLeave To Remain |
|
|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 2 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
 Leave to Remain by SD Curtis Jun 18, 2008
By Claude A. Murray
This is an outstanding examination of life in a camp as experienced by a number of refugees. The characters in the story attempt, in a moving way, to lead normal lives, but are shaped by their confined situation and react in ways that we cannot foresee. There is mastery in the quiet, smooth telling of the tale, in the colourful, vivid dialogue. Its conclusion is thought-provoking and entirely gripping.
 Insightful, provocative and very relevant Apr 07, 2008
By S. Kojakovic
Like Moshin Hamid's THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST, this book presents us with the voice of someone on `the other side' - in this case a dispossessed Muslim from somewhere in Central Asia whose finds that he cannot be neutral in today's post 9-11 world. Despite trying to live a normal life, he cannot escape the fact that he is a refugee and that he can never be accepted by society around him.
This is a story that leads the reader into the mind and world of a man trying to make the best of his life but somehow being forced by fate towards desperation and violence. We are given an insight into the daily routine of the refugee centre where the main character resides - the pettiness, the strain of living at close quarters with strangers, the tensions and the growing pull of Islam. I don't want to give too much of the plot away here, but there is also a love story in there - a poignant portrait of a love which tries to break the boundaries of culture and ethnicity (we are given to understand that she is an American Jew, he is a Central Asian Muslim and the story is set in Catholic Lithuania) - a struggle which echoes the larger struggle going on in our world today between religions, cultures and political systems.
There are many levels on which one can read this sensitive and shocking book - a simple tale of a man undone or as a metaphor for something larger and far more tragic and dangerous for humanity. Some of the details may be too close to comfort - but who ever said that literature should make us feel good about ourselves? If good books should make us question things about the society we live in, then this is one of them. Read it for yourself, but be prepared to be feel - whether it be pity or fear or downright outrage!
|
| | |
|
|
|
|
|
