With a Scottish professor of politics as his guide, a London-based Italian journalist traverses Scotland seeking a “big story” on the independence referendum. What he gets instead are small stories from myriad points of view: a Ukrainian nationalist, a Russian religious guru, an eccentric Estonian, an Algerian and a dying man, amongst many others.
After a chaotic romance with a Scottish campaigner, the journalist, aptly named Cinico de Oblivii, leaves his post in London and moves to Greece where, reflecting on his time in Scotland, he writes a memoir (this book). Through his anecdotes we encounter the full spectrum of ideas on Scottish independence, including the ones Cinico’s editor didn’t want to publish.
Beyond exploring Scotland’s political scene and its place in Europe, Cinico’s stories examine how Europeans interpret each other and, more generally, how people interrelate within a social context. Like Voltaire’s Candide, Cinico starts with the dominant mindset of his era, which is incapable of bringing him either understanding or contentment, but ends up with an awareness that, though insufficient for the elusive happiness we all seek, is sufficient enough for a perfectly acceptable human existence.
Sobre el autor
Allan Cameron was born in 1952, grew up in Nigeria and Bangladesh, and lived as a young adult in Italy. He has written two novels, The Golden Menagerie (Luath Press, 2004), partly based on Apuleius’s The Golden Ass but also a polemic against it, and The Berlusconi Bonus (Luath Press, 2005), a political satire principally directed at Western consumerism, the policies of Bush and Blair, and Fukuyama’s now disowned victory song of American capitalism. His non-fiction work, In Praise of the Garrulous (2008), is an examination of the essentiality of language to human nature. His two collections of short stories, Can the Gods Cry? and On the Heroism of Mortals, were published in 2011 and 2012.
Over the years, he has translated twenty-four books (Vagabond Voices 2016), and his two collections of poetry, Presbyopia and A Barrel of Dried Leaves, were published in 2009 and 2016.
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