Allan Massie VS Carnival by Rawi Hage
The author gets a break this time as The Scotsman‘s Allan Massie lays into the poor marketing assistant charged with writing Rawi Hage’s blurb:
“So when his blurb-writer declared that “Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of life’s passengers squirm in their comfortable, complacent backseats”, Rawi Hage should surely have thrown up his hands and cried, “For God’s sake, no!” The backseats are there because the narrator is a taxi driver called Fly, but how a backseat can be complacent beats me. Furthermore, how many people who might buy the book want to be made to squirm? Fortunately the novel isn’t half as bad as this recommendation makes it sound, or at any rate no more than half as bad.”
