TNY weekend reader: merci, mercy
(image: carolita johnson)
In “The Human Bomb” Adam Gopnik observes what many French people take unashamed comfort in:
The French police are not known for their gentle touch with psychos.
And the comparison of Nicolas Sarkozy to Brigitte Bardot is particularly insightful and apt, love-handles (poignées d’amour?) notwithstanding. Gopnik’s little twist of transfering the “Human Bomb” epithet from the actual Human Bomb to Sarkozy is also very French, rhetorically speaking. Très bien!
Luckily I read Gopnik’s piece before reading Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdin Electrician,†because that one piece of fiction was enough to sustain me for the whole week. If I’ve been waiting for another fiction piece to fall in love with, it was worth the wait. The suspense at the end, where we wonder if mercy will turn this piece into something else altogether, is acute. Is mercy a good thing of itself? Or is it a luxury? Does it really make one morally superior? Questions are raised.