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A review by oisin175
The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa
3.0
Roger Casement led an interesting life. He traveled the Congo with experienced and famous explorers. He was a Diplomat for Britain and worked on several reports detailing the human rights abuses of colonial powers in rubber plantations. He drew a connection between the plight of the colonized he reported on with the plight of the Irish. During World War I he traveled to Germany in an attempt to gain an allegiance that would help Ireland gain its independence. Despite his work for a free Ireland, he was largely ignored for decades because he was gay.
Despite the large amount of interesting information on Casement's life, this book fails to bring about much excitement. It's well written, though it acts as more of a fictionalized biography. It's written in the second person, though large sections read like a normal biography. This book seems to suffer from a lack of ambition. It's as if the author decided that Casement's life was so interesting he could spend a third of the book dealing with the final few days of Casement's life (which really works to provide information about his life/beliefs that weren't apparent otherwise, kind of like backstory). He then devoted the rest of the book to writing a straight forward biography with digressions into Casement's thoughts/ailments. It felt as thought the author wanted to write a fictional account of Casement's life but was worried about the book being inaccurate at the same time.
All in all, it is a decent book, though it isn't anything special or exciting. Based on the subject, the lack of interest in the reader is a pretty big disappointment.
Despite the large amount of interesting information on Casement's life, this book fails to bring about much excitement. It's well written, though it acts as more of a fictionalized biography. It's written in the second person, though large sections read like a normal biography. This book seems to suffer from a lack of ambition. It's as if the author decided that Casement's life was so interesting he could spend a third of the book dealing with the final few days of Casement's life (which really works to provide information about his life/beliefs that weren't apparent otherwise, kind of like backstory). He then devoted the rest of the book to writing a straight forward biography with digressions into Casement's thoughts/ailments. It felt as thought the author wanted to write a fictional account of Casement's life but was worried about the book being inaccurate at the same time.
All in all, it is a decent book, though it isn't anything special or exciting. Based on the subject, the lack of interest in the reader is a pretty big disappointment.