*Undeterred by the grumpy review, I'm inclined to read this. One wonders if Gaddafi, like Saddam Hussein, collects Rowena knock-off fantasy paintings.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/24/dictator-lit-gaddafi
(...)
Slightly more interesting (and almost a story) is Suicide of the Astronaut, in which a man visits the moon, finds nothing, and upon his return to earth discovers that his qualifications as a space explorer leave him, like an arts grad, unable to secure useful work. He commits suicide. Thus, Gaddafi seems to be stating that space exploration is, well, a load of bollocks. In the title story – a truly unhinged free-form eruption of useless words – Gaddafi declares that it was an "Arab prince", not Columbus, who discovered America. The rest is incoherent blather. In Death, he tackles the pressing question: is death a man, and thus to be fought, or a woman to whose tender embrace we must surrender? I won't ruin the ending for you.
Yet, while Escape to Hell is undeniably awful, it is not uniformly so. Gaddafi has a real gift for invective: he can spew with the best of them. He can also do sarcasm, and there are several entertaining passages in which he ridicules the obscurantism of Islamists...
via @nilanjanaroy
