The New RepublicBy Lionel ShriverSnappy ReviewClever.
An interesting account and eye-opening, not only in the way she writes.
How much trust we give to the media and what they tell us.
How much we’ve come to rely on them and the foibles of individuals, who are no less human than ourselves, and prey to the same weaknesses.
Layers upon layers of different stories that makes for a brilliant tongue in cheek read.
SynopsisFrom the acclaimed author of the National Book Award finalist SO MUCH FOR THAT comes a part parable, part adventure story about a group of foreign correspondents reporting from a nonexistent peninsula of Portugal in the mid-1990s. Edgar Kellogg , a disgruntled New York lawyer who has always yearned to be popular, is more than ready to leave his lucrative career for the excitement and uncertainty of journalism. When he’s offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognises the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he’s been sent to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize, well-loved character he longs to emulate. Yet all is not as it appears. ‘the Daring Soldiers of Barba’ (the SOB) have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal, backward, and windblown that you couldn’t give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the SOB suddenly dry up? A droll, playful novel, the New Republic addresses weighty issues like terrorism with the deft, tongue-in-cheek touch that is vintage Shriver. It also presses the more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug? What’s their secret? And in the end, who has the better life-the admired, or the admirer?