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The deception
By Nicolas Born
0 - Default Title
Description
At thirty-nine, Georg Laschen is running from a loveless marriage. Assigned to Beirut in 1976, at the height of the Lebanese civil war, he soon finds it impossible to convey the true horror around him in the conventional reports his newspaper requires. Every palatable sentence he writes in his hotel room is a distortion and betrayal of the slaughter and blight he witnesses outside.
Laschen seeks escape from a creeping paralysis and self-reproach through a love affair with Ariane, the young German widow of a Christian Lebanese. His fantasies of starting a new life with her are threatened by her obsession with a newly adopted child. The further discovery of her infidelity leads Laschen to enter, with deliberate bravado, a nighttime battle zone under shell fire. There at last the professional observer of war becomes a participant in its terrible realities.
Distinguished by its unflinching evocation of mortal conflict within and without, The Deception is an impressive addition to the literature of war and redemption.
"It reads like an anticipation of his, our sickness - the absurdity of the normal. Accidents that have ceased to frighten us. The exploitation of horror. The sophistries of madness. The closeness that alienates. Love, that will-o'-the-wisp. The narrowing of our condition."
- Gunter Grass
"I found Born's novel unusually exciting and stimulating, partly because of the light it casts on recent events in Beirut (and on their coverage by the press and TV), but mainly because it goes so directly to the heart of its subject matter, which is the conscience of words, The Deception that is waged in the name of 'objective reporting' and the real nature and ultimate logic of that ghastly entertainment we refer to as 'the news'. "
- JoelAgee
Product details
Publication Date:
1983
Publisher:
Little, Brown
Languages:
Published:
English
ISBN10:
0316102733
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