Review: Alessandro Spina’s ‘Confines of the Shadow’
This review was meant to be published two years ago, but the magazine that requested it went dark. So here, to accompany our piece on the crowdfunding campaign for the […]
This review was meant to be published two years ago, but the magazine that requested it went dark. So here, to accompany our piece on the crowdfunding campaign for the […]
“Reading ‘The Orange Grove’ with my journalist’s eye, I am tempted to pick fault with it[.]”
The collection’s best stories — of which there are many — aren’t interested in djinn as a site of the exotic, wish-granting imaginary. Instead, they employ djinn in tales that move sideways to explore cruelty or loss, adolescence or injustice.
“Here, we are confronted with the question: In our act of reading, are we down there with the narrator or are we up there with the drone?”
“To help me explore Hisham Matar’s The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land In Between (2016), I ordered a sneeze-inducing, water-stained copy of Knud Holmboe’s Desert Encounter: An Adventurous Journey Through Italian Africa (my copy was printed in 1937), re-read parts of Alessandro Spina’s Confines of the Shadow epic, and even, among other things, pulled Dante off the shelf.”
“If there is a villain in this book, it is not Muammar Ghaddafi, who we never see. It is his bald son Seif[.]”
“The narrator Abla/Loula tells her story – alternating between the two sides of her schizophrenic self – against the background of the turbulent political times that followed the January 25th revolution.”
“There are few names in the narrative, and only a few characters who appear throughout the novel to guide the reader through. It is easier to regard the landscape as the only consistent character.”
“Think you might read ‘2084’? You should, but be prepared.”