Maror by Lavie Tidhar review / Violence and corruption in Israel’s underbelly

 

Tidhar maps out an amoral Tel Aviv where greed outweighs ideology. 

Review

The best fiction of 2023

Maror by Lavie Tidhar review – violence and corruption in Israel’s underbelly

The pragmatism of power is explored in a detective novel that takes in drugs, guns, politics and religion

Jake Arnott

Saturday 13 August 2022

F

rom its inception, the noir novel has provided a suitably brutal critique of capitalism and modern statecraft. The first of its kind, Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), depicted a midwest town where industrialists used gangsters to deal with organised labour, only to lose control of the violent forces they had unleashed. A stark tale based on the author’s own experience as a Pinkerton strikebreaker, it spawned a whole genre in which detectives manage crime rather than solve it.

The Trees by Percival Everett review – potent satire of US racism

This Booker-longlisted investigation of gruesome murders in Mississippi addresses a deep political issue through page-turning comic horror

Jake Arnott
Wed 31 Aug 2022 11.00 BST

 

Percival Everett is a seriously playful writer. His 2001 breakthrough novel Erasure lampooned the dominant culture’s expectations of Black authors, in a wonderfully discursive meditation on the angst of the African American middle classes and the nature of literature and art itself (its title is a reference to Robert Rauschenberg rubbing out a drawing by Willem de Kooning). The novel within the novel is a self-consciously absurd parody of “ghetto” fiction called My Pafology. Everett’s latest work, The Trees, now longlisted for the Booker prize, is a harsher, more unmediated satire, a fast-paced comedy with elements of crime and horror that directly addresses racism in a boldly shocking manner.