82-Year-old Novel Is The Main Book Of LABAF 2017

SINCLAIR Lewis’ It can’t happen here is the main book of the 19th Lagos Book and Art Festival, holding at the Freedom Park on Broad Street from November 6 to 12, 2017. It will be discussed in a panel conversation. Parts of it will be dramatized during the Festival’s opening. This 1935 novel imagines a vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fear mongering demagogue winning the 1936 Presidential elections in the United States. Just like Donald Trump, whose emergence as President the book anticipated 81 years earlier, the main character Buzz Windrip promised poor, angry voters that he would make America proud and prosperous once more. Mr. Trump’s rhetoric has heightened tensions in the Korean Peninsula and made the chances of a nuclear war more certain than any American President ever did. In It can’ t happen here, Wind rip took the country down a darker path. As in Mr Lewis’ fictional 1936, Liberals all over the world, in 2017, are debating whether Mr. Trump’s administration will last its full tenure. It can’ t happen here was selected because of how glumly it fits the theme of LABAF 2017: Eruptions: global fractures and our common humanity .15 books will be discussed over a period of six days.