Exceptional, just exceptional. ( )

I'm not sure if it was the author or the translator, but the pace and narration seemed a little uneven. Great story, thoroughly-conceived world, important ideas, though. ( )

Great ideas and some really fun bits of writing. But overall, I’m sorry to say, it’s just too heavy and dense to be an enjoyable read. ( )

A young man confined to a TB sanatorium in the high mountains is forced to reconsider some of his most basic assumptions about the world he is living in ... hang on a minute, this is supposed to be a new take on Orwell, not Thomas Mann, isn't it?

Anyway, it soon becomes clear that we aren't in Davos any more, Toto, but in a dystopian, post-nuclear world, where a benevolent leader, Abi (even I know that means "elder brother", so we're back on track), his face on millions of posters, protects his people against a remote but always dangerous enemy, in return for their devotion and complete submission to the intrusion of the state into every corner of their lives and thoughts.

This isn't quite the 1984 we're used to, though. The use of Abilang (Newspeak) constrains the things that can be said and thought, there is no history of any time earlier than 2084, but in place of Orwell's metaphor of the Party, Abistan is a world run under the religious slogan that "there is no god but Yölah, and Abi is his representative". It turns out that a cruelly distorted version of Islam can be used to create a totalitarian, fascist society every bit as effectively as Stalinism did.

As in Orwell's original, we're well aware that a lot of the horrors and abuses Sansal describes are not a million miles away from things that happen in the real world in our time. It's only really the scale that changes in this dystopian view: Abistan claims to be the whole world, but our Winston Smith character, Ati, has his doubts: there are rumours of a frontier, and if there is a frontier, then there must be something on the other side of that frontier.

Clever, angry, engaged humanism, very engaging once you get into it, although I did find the first few chapters, in which the pace of the story is slowed down to Magic mountain-like speeds, quite hard going. Worth the effort, though. ( )

חיקוי עלוב ומייגע ל 1984 ולדיסטופיות �חרות. �ין לי מושג למה זה בפרסי� �ולי בגלל שה�נטי �יסל�מיות היו� ב�ופנה. �ני בכל �ופן התגברתי בקושי על 20% מהספר ( )