| The
Burning Mirror
is a mixture of the seamy and the spiritual, the subtle, the baroque
and the brutal. The
canvas is broad: everything from Glaswegian Asian gangsta stories
to themes drawn from various Trans-Mediterranean cultures, from the
philosophising of a spirit trapped in a bottle to the everyday tribulations
of a Catholic Evangelist, from a searing portrayal of brick-making
villages in Pakistan to a Pointillist love story set amidst the late
Twentieth Century Balkan Wars. A young man's search, across the Himalayan peaks, for an incarnation of mystical love; a cycle of Celtic stories, stretching across decades; Lata Mangeshkar and the night river in a Govan kebab house; lovers murdering their rivals … With consummate skill and intense physicality, Saadi experiments with form as well as content, and with the medium, itself. Words dance across the page in a dialectic of the imagination. A talented new voice in European fiction. |
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