Negative Positive
Title: No cultural insights
Review: An unsatisfying book, recounting an implausible story of sheer fantasy with no/little pretensions of reality. I chose the book expecting to glean cultural insight of places (Algeria in this case) that I'll never visit, based on book-cover and online write-ups with remarks such as "devastatingly imaginative observer of the West's encounter with the East" and "Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures." The book attained none of this, it dwelled for pages on sheer fantasy, highly implausible events, characters of dubious sanity, and offered no cultural insights beyond recounting the heat and grit of African life, with both of which I'm already familiar.
Is the review positive or negative? 