Pulp.net - Hisham Matar

I don’t have a ‘best’, but I do very much admire Joseph Conrad’s ‘Amy Foster’. It tells the story of a South-Slav peasant exiled in a Kentish village where everyone fears him except Amy Foster, a plain girl who eventually marries him. But when he falls ill and reverts to his mother tongue, she, too, is frightened by his foreignness. She takes their child and abandons him. He dies alone. It’s a tragic story about language, fear and loneliness.

Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat for Europeans and Americans, Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa for the Middle East.

Can’t think of one.

Gilgamesh, Dante’s Comedy, the haunting story of Orpheus, the poems Ovid wrote from his bleak exile by the Romanian coast of the Black Sea, Albert Camus’ luminous essays, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (translated by Denys Johnson-Davies). And, more recently, Latecomers by Anita Brookner, Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (translated by Ahdaf Soueif) and the marvellous Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels.

An ongoing contest, but here’s a current favourite: ‘I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.’ From the miraculous Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.

Merleau-Ponty’s book on Cézanne, particularly the essay “Cézanne’s Doubt”.

John Sandoe (www.johnsandoe.com) in London, Peter Budek’s Eagle Bookshop (www.eaglebookshop.co.uk) in Bedford, Madbouli in Cairo (particularly the secret apartment upstairs, stacked with banned books), and Powells (www.powells.com) in Portland, Oregon.

I think Mario Vargas Llosa has done enough to get it.

Most writers I admire I have no interest in meeting, but I would have liked to have met Albert Camus.