Volume 48, Number 1 · January 11, 2001
Mind Painting
By John Leonard
Plowing the Dark
by Richard Powers
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 415 pp., $25.00
Blindfolded, mummified, ankle-chained to a radiator in a white room in the bare ruined choirs of bloody Beirut, Taimur Martin in Plowing the Dark is about as political as a mattress or a prayer mat. He is a sadsack phantom in his own life, a teacher of English who ran away from love gone wrong in Chicago to civil war in Lebanon, and now finds himself, less as a hostage than a 'collateral pawn,' held by Shi'ite guerrillas 'for imaginary leverage in a game where no one can say just what constitutes winning.'
Review, 6317 words
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