Lavie Tidhar: Unholy land (2018)
262 pages
English language
Published April 7, 2018
"Lior Tirosh is a semi-successful author of pulp fiction, an inadvertent time traveler, and an ongoing source of disappointment to his father. Tirosh has returned to his homeland in East Africa. But Palestina--a Jewish state founded in the early 20th century--has grown dangerous. The government is building a vast border wall to keep out African refugees. Unrest in Ararat City is growing. And Tirosh's childhood friend, trying to deliver a warning, has turned up dead in his hotel room. A state security officer has now identified Tirosh as a suspect in a string of murders. A rogue agent is stalking Tirosh through transdimensional rifts--possible futures that can only be prevented by avoiding the mistakes of the past. From the bestselling author of Central Station comes an extraordinary new novel recalling China Miéville and Michael Chabon, entertaining and subversive in equal measures."--
Dissatisfying, despite the interesting premise, especially the final few parts which seemed like the frame of a house without the necessary walls in too many areas.
Tidhar does his thing again, with alternate realities. This time we visit the Uganda Plan.
What if the Plan to establish a Jewish state in Africa came to fruition.
Involving thee points of view, and system behind the alternate reality setup, this fast paced Novel is easier to follow than previous Tidhar novels I've read.
I wish Tidhar could have imagined more differences between African Palestina and Middle Eastern Israel. While I believe a conflict with the local population would have arisen there too, it might have developed in a different manner. Tidhar just takes the same elements of the conflict to extremes and places them in front of an African landscape.
Tidhar loves name dropping, and I'm glad to say that in general he avoided placing the same historical characters in the alternate reality. The great general isn't called Sharon or Dayan.
He does however call the Jewish state …
Tidhar does his thing again, with alternate realities. This time we visit the Uganda Plan.
What if the Plan to establish a Jewish state in Africa came to fruition.
Involving thee points of view, and system behind the alternate reality setup, this fast paced Novel is easier to follow than previous Tidhar novels I've read.
I wish Tidhar could have imagined more differences between African Palestina and Middle Eastern Israel. While I believe a conflict with the local population would have arisen there too, it might have developed in a different manner. Tidhar just takes the same elements of the conflict to extremes and places them in front of an African landscape.
Tidhar loves name dropping, and I'm glad to say that in general he avoided placing the same historical characters in the alternate reality. The great general isn't called Sharon or Dayan.
He does however call the Jewish state in Africa Palestina. That has a great inverted effect as Israelis are now called Palestinians, but really, why would a colony called British Judea chose to name itself Palestina when it gained independence?
I did encounter a glaring plot hole, when in a world without the holocaust, and where the red swastika operates in the disputed territories, a soldier is traumatized by an encounter with soldiers sporing Nazi arm bands.
