Playful, provocative novel mixing thriller, memoir, and literary ambition.
Great for fans of Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.
MYSTERY/THRILLER My Neighbour Osama Bin Laden Yslar Tatuky | Austin Macauley Publishers 174p, e-book, $4.50, ISBN 978-1-398-47105-4
In this philosophical novel with elements of memoir and thriller, Tatuky imagines a grabber of a high-concept scenario and uses it to interrogate art, humanity, evil, and more. It begins when an alphabet soup of international intelligence agencies bring a mysterious man to live in the narrator’s small town in the country of Georgia in 2012. After making the acquaintance of Mustafa, the new arrival, Tatuky concludes that he must actually be Osama Bin Laden, not dead after all, face changed through plastic surgery. Through a series of philosophical digressions, extended tangents on his family’s history and significance, and indulgent explorations of film, music, and literature, Tatuky makes it his project to reform Mustafa/Osama, even endeavoring to arrange an accidental meetup between the terrorist and another notable in town hidden by intelligence agencies—Salman Rushdie.
While exploring racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice, Tatuky also puts together a spy thriller made all the more exciting by how shocking and rapid the escalation into violence becomes. Tatuky befriends Rushdie, one of his favorite writers, even as the duo is beset by assassins. (The real-life Rushdie’s erudition, ambition, courage, and sense of play clearly has influenced this novel’s composition.) Slowly but surely, Tatuky helps lead Mustafa to a change of heart and sees him experience actual happiness, before tragedy strikes.
While English is not Tatuky’s first language, and there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors, his sheer enthusiasm for writing is evident on every page. He has a passion for communicating his beliefs, his interests, and his aesthetic point of view and wraps them into every portion of the narrative, recommending movies or songs that seem fitting, offering vivid descriptions of life in post-Soviet Georgia, and wringing pathos out of the shaving of a mustache. The end result is self-indulgent, to be sure, but it’s also an engaging geopolitical thriller and touching personal statement.
Cover: B- | Design & typography: A | Illustrations: – Editing: A- | Marketing copy: A