Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of re-examining history through storytelling to reveal deeper truths.
Salman Rushdie praises Laila Lalami's work for its ability to reimagine a significant historical moment—the encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans. He highlights how Lalami's narrative not only confronts the brutalities of this history but also seeks to provide a version that feels authentic, challenging the often falsified accounts of the past and thus encouraging readers to reconsider their understanding of historical events through the lens of fiction.
In practice
In a book club discussion to emphasize the power of fiction in understanding history.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.
There are two kinds of man: the ones who make history and the ones who endure it.
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.
One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans (1888).
There's a big mistake that people make with history, which is to think that people in the past were just like us, but wearing crinolines. They lived in different worlds.
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