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Imraan Coovadia wrote the following letter to the Sunday Times, regarding my review of his Green-eyed Thieves. The paper did not publish the letter - it merely printed a correction - so here it is, with my brief response, in full.
Dear Editor:
In his review of my novel, Green-eyed Thieves, published 6 August in the Sunday Times, Ben Oswest twice refers to the brother of the narrator as Ahmed.
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In my review of Imraan Coovadia’s Green-Eyed Thieves, I gave the name of the main character’s brother as “Ahmed”. In fact - as Coovadia has since pointed out, in a letter to be published in this week’s Sunday Times - the correct name is “Ashraf”.
The error is mine and I regret it. Tune into Boswestblog on Sunday for Coovadia’s letter and my full response. I’ve meanwhile corrected the name in my post of the review:
by Imraan Coovadia
Umuzi, 2006
reviewed by Ben Oswest
Coovadia’s latest novel is the “book of the week” in today’s Sunday Times; I wrote the review, which the paper published in slightly-edited form.
Here’s the review in full:
Of the many astute observations tossed out with offhand dexterity in Imraan Coovadia’s Green-Eyed Thieves, one of the most telling is the remark from the novel’s main character – the aptly-named Firoze Peer – that “It’s a defining trait of great villains… to flourish in death.” The “great villain” Peer refers to is none other than Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on September 11, 2001, and, posthumously, a personality flourishing in the imaginations of dozens of writers, including John Updike and Martin Amis.
