Anthony Gardner
Fiendish Foresight
Paul Theroux is not an author to underplay a useful motif. In the first paragraph of his new novel, we find a planeful of passengers settled down for a night flight in their sleep-masks. No sooner have they arrived at their destination – Ecuador – than the protagonist, Slade Steadman, and his lover Ava Katsina embark on an erotic game of blind man’s buff; and when, shortly afterwards, they set off along a jungle river to experience a Secoya drug ceremony, their guide insists on covering their eyes with strips of cloth.
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The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties