I dun seem to be able to converse with women anymore, all that charm and wit and the tools of the male trade, vanished into thin air, leaving only a fool staring ahead with a mouth like that of a goldfish.

But enuff of that, I refer you to this article

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/09/1092022403750.html

An author has cheated us readers. She has spun a wonderful web of story-telling, one that we all enjoyed and eagerly clamoured for more, writing to tell this... charlatan, to grace us with more of her emotions, characters and plot. We loved her. Until we found out that her words held no shred of truth in them, until we discovered we were the foolish idiots who had given ourselves fully to a book that was not real, to a story that was fabricated. And we do not like being fools.

So we pull her book off the shelves and scream for her head. This author, Norma Khouri.

Why? What was the problem? Yes, the story was not real, the facts falsified, the whole book untrue. Norma Khouri wrote about a story of a loss, she described a situation most of us would never know, a life which was pretty much foreign to most of us. SHE TOLD A STORY.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure story-tellers have the ardous job of doing just that, telling stories. If not, they would just be called tellers and that job's taken by people in banks. That's besides the point of course. The main point I'm trying to make here is this: Yes, she lied... but does that give us an excuse to lynch her? Is it right to attack somebody with such mob intensity, jus because her tale is just that... a tale?

When read, ignoring who wrote it, why it was written, when and where, how the book is written is absolutely amazing. The descriptions are discrete yet powerful, the characters strong and believable and the tale moving indeed. Put in the author and we have a person who is supposedly from Jordon. From there we can move to the other questions, why, when and where. Answering those questions can only enhance the whole experience, and the lack thereof should not cause readers to deter from the actual gem within the text. It is the text itself that grips people, that causes us to think, not who wrote it.

It is not a question about truth here, it is the idea of a superficial reading society. It is one that focuses more on what is known rather than what is yet to be known. If Norma Khouri's book was a fiction, would it sell as well? Moving past sales, would the book still intrigue readers? I seriously think it will. Being optimistic, I tend to think the best of people, that they will see past the politics and economics and morals of a lie, and rather, flip the page and read what happens next. Norma Khouri's lie should not have caused her book to be taken off shelves, just relocated to the Fiction section.