Tonight:
4°c
Review: A genuinely original book
Jonathan Myerson, Daily Mail 27 Aug 2003
This is a clever book. This is a fantastically clever book. Though this novel's jacket warns you that it 'is not about politics', the claim is as disingenuous as the book's own narrator who constantly invades the narrative, telling you whether he likes his characters or not, or that he is 'worried we are ignoring' this character or that one.
Ostensibly, the simple story of how Moshe and Nana fall in love and then invite bisexual Anjali into their lives and bed is anything but simple. It's the sort of book where Stendhal, de Sade and Bogart make regular appearances in the digressions.
And what is he digressing from? Usually it's graphic portrayals of sex. And yet miraculously, amid this cool, mannerly and distinctly authorial prose, he manages to evoke a sweet sadness for his characters, a genuine poignancy which strikes you - especially at the end - as a surprise.
Out of a doctoral inquisition into the strangeness of sex comes a funny and strangely insightful romance. A genuinely original book.
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