To understand Russia's nineteenth century, is it better to read a history book, or War and Peace? The history book will tell you the facts, but you will Tolstoy perhaps a deeper understanding of things. It's the same in terms of contemporary politics: sometimes fiction can give us a clearer view of the facts that the documentary.
The informant and disturbing novel Hisham Matar, In the land of men [Denoël, 2007], and said the cruelty of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi a much more effective than any title of the press. In recent years, Western journalists have often yielded to the temptation to portray Gaddafi as a dictator of comic opera, with its ridiculous uniform, his endless diatribes and his muse he describes - in a document leaked by Wikileaks - like " his voluptuous Ukrainian nurse.
In the land of men brutally reminds us that what happens in Gaddafi's Libya is a tragedy, not comedy. It shows the fear of those living under the dictatorship of Libya, the betrayals, the arrests, torture and disruption of human relationships. Hisham Matar's father, former diplomat and Libyan dissident, disappeared in Cairo in 1990.
It is perhaps still alive in the prisons of Gaddafi. The story of his son was published in 2006 and was part of the Booker Prize candidates, the major British literary award. The action, located in 1979, is a bitter sting reminder that Libya has long suffered. "It is our duty to call injustice by its name," insists one of the democracy activists who are plotting against the regime.
The rebels who rose up in Benghazi and elsewhere today must think the same kind of thing. Hisham Matar is monitoring events from London, where he has just published a new novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance [Anatomy of a loss]. The power of fiction to tell the injustice with a unique emotional power is that novels are able to change history.
Cabin Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, fanned the outrage over slavery in the years preceding the Civil War. A day of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has become the story of absolute hell of the Soviet gulag. But what the tourist books that interested in politics must now be put in his luggage? Hisham Matar is if the writer who has done most to say the reality of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, Alaa El-Aswany, author of The Yacoubian Building (published in 2002 [Actes Sud, 2006]), is one that best record in the seething dissatisfaction of Egypt Hosni Mubarak.
While Hisham Matar's novel is tragic, that of Alaa El-Aswany is often savagely funny. But there stands the portrait of a country where those who honestly try to advance is hindered and humiliated, while those who are corrupt and have knowledge in the political progress. On reading The Yacoubian Building is easy to see why Tahrir Square was filled with angry youths.
Before the land of men, the novel "policy" that had the most marked since the beginning of the year was Disgrace by JM Coetzee [Le Seuil, 2002], which I read during a stay in South Africa . JM Coetzee is a source of both pride and irritation in his native country, he received a Nobel Prize, but also an exile and an Afrikaner whose books paint a bleak picture of the "new South Africa ".
More disgrace being a work of art that a political pamphlet, it would be wrong if we took his remarks at face value. But even so, the novel aspects of the hairpin modern South Africa, including the paralyzing fear of crime and the influence of political correctness on the newly reformed universities.
Aravind Adiga's novel, The White Tiger, [Buchet Chastel, 2008] made me reconsider some of my prejudices about modern India. Like many foreign journalists, I was attached to a number of clichés about the country: a booming economy, the world's largest democracy, a great tradition of the rule of law.
Aravind Adiga's book reveals the brutality and contempt for the law and the exploitation of the poor who often hide behind the neat slogans. It does what fiction is often more effectively than journalism: to show that those who live without power. The capacity of fiction to hear from those who have no voice explains why it sometimes takes a novel to understand why Egypt and Libya were on the brink of revolution, or why the Maoist rebels continue to exist in India despite a growth rate of 8 to 9% per year.
Knowing this, I sometimes ask my friends living abroad, what good novels have been published recently in their region. A Russian colleague recently informed me that the country of Tolstoy and Chekhov no longer produces great literature. Putin's Russia is apparently good at thrillers. Chinese colleagues told me not to miss A Civil Servant's Notebook [Notes of a staff member] Wang Xiaofang, to be published in English later this year.
Xiaofang Wang is a former official whose works food, full of verve chronic official corruption, are very popular in China. The topics are also of interest to many foreign businessmen have to work in a Chinese system difficult to understand and that requires moral compromise can be avoided in their countries.
The moral of the story extends beyond China. Naive hope that some professors and businessmen less naive who rushed to deal with Colonel Gaddafi would hesitate if they first read the land of men. Sometimes fiction is the best way to practice. 
The informant and disturbing novel Hisham Matar, In the land of men [Denoël, 2007], and said the cruelty of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi a much more effective than any title of the press. In recent years, Western journalists have often yielded to the temptation to portray Gaddafi as a dictator of comic opera, with its ridiculous uniform, his endless diatribes and his muse he describes - in a document leaked by Wikileaks - like " his voluptuous Ukrainian nurse.
In the land of men brutally reminds us that what happens in Gaddafi's Libya is a tragedy, not comedy. It shows the fear of those living under the dictatorship of Libya, the betrayals, the arrests, torture and disruption of human relationships. Hisham Matar's father, former diplomat and Libyan dissident, disappeared in Cairo in 1990.
It is perhaps still alive in the prisons of Gaddafi. The story of his son was published in 2006 and was part of the Booker Prize candidates, the major British literary award. The action, located in 1979, is a bitter sting reminder that Libya has long suffered. "It is our duty to call injustice by its name," insists one of the democracy activists who are plotting against the regime.
The rebels who rose up in Benghazi and elsewhere today must think the same kind of thing. Hisham Matar is monitoring events from London, where he has just published a new novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance [Anatomy of a loss]. The power of fiction to tell the injustice with a unique emotional power is that novels are able to change history.
Cabin Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, fanned the outrage over slavery in the years preceding the Civil War. A day of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, has become the story of absolute hell of the Soviet gulag. But what the tourist books that interested in politics must now be put in his luggage? Hisham Matar is if the writer who has done most to say the reality of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, Alaa El-Aswany, author of The Yacoubian Building (published in 2002 [Actes Sud, 2006]), is one that best record in the seething dissatisfaction of Egypt Hosni Mubarak.
While Hisham Matar's novel is tragic, that of Alaa El-Aswany is often savagely funny. But there stands the portrait of a country where those who honestly try to advance is hindered and humiliated, while those who are corrupt and have knowledge in the political progress. On reading The Yacoubian Building is easy to see why Tahrir Square was filled with angry youths.
Before the land of men, the novel "policy" that had the most marked since the beginning of the year was Disgrace by JM Coetzee [Le Seuil, 2002], which I read during a stay in South Africa . JM Coetzee is a source of both pride and irritation in his native country, he received a Nobel Prize, but also an exile and an Afrikaner whose books paint a bleak picture of the "new South Africa ".
More disgrace being a work of art that a political pamphlet, it would be wrong if we took his remarks at face value. But even so, the novel aspects of the hairpin modern South Africa, including the paralyzing fear of crime and the influence of political correctness on the newly reformed universities.
Aravind Adiga's novel, The White Tiger, [Buchet Chastel, 2008] made me reconsider some of my prejudices about modern India. Like many foreign journalists, I was attached to a number of clichés about the country: a booming economy, the world's largest democracy, a great tradition of the rule of law.
Aravind Adiga's book reveals the brutality and contempt for the law and the exploitation of the poor who often hide behind the neat slogans. It does what fiction is often more effectively than journalism: to show that those who live without power. The capacity of fiction to hear from those who have no voice explains why it sometimes takes a novel to understand why Egypt and Libya were on the brink of revolution, or why the Maoist rebels continue to exist in India despite a growth rate of 8 to 9% per year.
Knowing this, I sometimes ask my friends living abroad, what good novels have been published recently in their region. A Russian colleague recently informed me that the country of Tolstoy and Chekhov no longer produces great literature. Putin's Russia is apparently good at thrillers. Chinese colleagues told me not to miss A Civil Servant's Notebook [Notes of a staff member] Wang Xiaofang, to be published in English later this year.
Xiaofang Wang is a former official whose works food, full of verve chronic official corruption, are very popular in China. The topics are also of interest to many foreign businessmen have to work in a Chinese system difficult to understand and that requires moral compromise can be avoided in their countries.
The moral of the story extends beyond China. Naive hope that some professors and businessmen less naive who rushed to deal with Colonel Gaddafi would hesitate if they first read the land of men. Sometimes fiction is the best way to practice.
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