Fintan O’Toole in the New York Times:
In the novel, El Akkad disturbs his readers by projecting America’s present into a terrifying vision of what their familiar homeland might look like many decades hence. Here, he seeks to discomfit us by doing the opposite — asking us to look back on the present from an imagined future: “One day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness. … One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence.”
Yet El Akkad himself is struggling against silence — not the taciturnity of indifference or cowardice but the near muteness imposed by the inadequacy of language in the face of mass obliteration. “One Day” reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s statement about having “no power to express … together with the obligation to express.” Whatever one thinks of its arguments, the book has the desperate vitality of a writer trying to wrench from mere words some adequate answer to his own question: “What is left to say but more dead, more dead?”
More here.
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