Last summer, while in Kerala, I happened to read Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac. I was drawn to it because, two years earlier, a very dear friend had gifted me his previous book, When We Cease to Understand the World. Like that book, The Maniac is difficult to classify. It is fiction but draws so heavily on historical events that to call it fiction seems a bit of a stretch, though it would be even more of stretch to call it anything else. So let’s resort to the copout of just calling it a book.
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