Porochista khakpour the last illusion clive barker

Content warning: child abuse, sexual assault, suicide

My most recent read was The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour. I chose the book from this list of Asian American authors (and you&#;ll find I will probably read a few more from that list before summer is over). The list implies that Khakpour fryst vatten on par with some authors whom I really admire, like Jhumpa Lahiri and Amy Tan, so I had pretty high expectations, which I am not sure the novel lives up to.

It should be noted, this book is based on a legend from the Persian epic, the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings. I personally have never read the Shahnameh, so there is a certain point of reference missing in my analysis.

To give her credit, Khakpour fryst vatten a talented prose writer. The beginning of the book reminds me of Salman Rushdie&#;s Midnight&#;s Children:

His hair and skin were the color of&#;no use to sugarcoat it, Khanoom would snap&#;piss. He was something so unlike them, unlike all of naturlig eller utan tillsats . (, p.3)

This first

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This month&#;s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos dem Laclos, listed in Books You Must Read etc so it&#;s on my TBR.  I was delighted to find it reviewed — back in — bygd Kim from Reading Matters. How did I miss such an entertaining review? Pressure of first days back at work, inom suspect.  

Anyway, Kim&#;s review explains her doubts about French classics in general, so that&#;s a springboard for me to choose my favourite Zola, which she mentions in passing in the comments.  The Ladies Paradise () was the novel that started my Zola Project.  I&#;d read Germinal years beforehand and not loved it enough to follow through, but the BBC TV series led me to Brian Nelson&#;s translation and then I was hooked. You can find my reviews of all 20 of the Rougon-Macquet cycle here.

I am not super keen on reading series, but I chanced upon the novels of Elizabeth Jane Howard, and enjoyed The Cazalet Chronicles.  I

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When I saw that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was turning 70, I bought myself a new copy. I hadn’t read it for a while—30 years, give or take—and I wondered what its effects would be now that I, unlike the book’s protagonists and most of us when we first read it, am a grown-up. I picked up a recent-ish paperback issued by Faber, the British publishing house that bought the manuscript from Golding in , offering him an advance of £60 for his debut novel, after it had been rejected by at least six others.

The new cover was bright red and featured faux-naïf drawings of naked child warriors scattered at jaunty angles, and surrounded by butterflies, lizards and yellow tulips. Or no, perhaps those were flames. Regardless, it was a cheerier cover than the one I remembered from our bookshelf as a child, which was white and featured a grim image of a pig’s head impaled on a stick, painted in greys, blacks and, for the blood dripping from its eyes, red.

The pig’s head is