BOOK REVIEWS

ary career, and it is one such bout of “feverish writing” that gives birth to his most frantically written novel, Hunger’s Hopes.

These building blocks soon come crashing down, however. Few novelists expect to meet their (supposedly imaginary) protagonist at the launch of the book in which this character features, but this is what happens to the writer of Hunger’s Hopes. As it emerges that its schizophrenic protagonist, who carries the impossibly rare name of Nishan Hamza Nishan, is in fact a real person, the horrified writer witnesses haunting details from his literary creation – a habit of stuffing children’s ragdolls with explosives during manic episodes, for example – materialize in reality. The writer realises that he has condemned this man to a horrible fate, a fate that may already be taking its course. Feeling personally responsible, he attempts to reverse his protagonist’s fate. Such attempts soon prove impossible: chaos ensues and the writer loses all sense of reality. Nowhere more so than in the unexpected, jolting closing lines of Tag Elsir’s novel, where the protagonist’s own sanity is thrown into question.

Telepathy is dark and confusing: mental asylums and povertystricken slums fuse with high-society literary events and social media sites on which aspiring writers compete for popularity. The writer protagonist is clearly fascinated by other people and their unique quirks and characteristics, yet seems to spend more time craving seclusion than company. At times he identifies astute (and intriguing) observations about society, whilst at others he writes with seemingly inexcusable inconsistencies, drowned in apparent apathy. Rather than diminishing the credibility of the work, these extremes only serve to highlight the instability that surrounds the entire framework of the novel. This is a provoking, not to say uncomfortable, read. The aftertaste of insanity will linger long after the reader has made a judgement on the novel’s literary merit.

BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015 199