‘Everything I say is gospel’ … This is a powerful tale of the demise of a megalomaniacColonel Gaddafi possessed a personality so colourful that it begged to be made into fiction. Yasmina Khadra – the pseudonym for Algerian ex-military man and bestselling writer Mohammed Moulessehoul – obliges in The Dictator’s final Night,a title to be filed alongside such great dictator novels as García Mrquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, approximately an archetypal tyrant, and Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat,set in the final hours of the Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo. Although Khadra matches neither the epic scale nor the experimental virtuosity of those two books, his writing here is compulsive, or funny,powerfully emotional and often sinuously clever.
For his final night, the “untameable jealous tiger that urinates on international conventions to price his territory” is confined to a disused school in Sirte, and the sky aflame with Nato bombs and rebel bullets,his generals either fleeing or collapsing from exhaustion. Like Hitler in the bunker he rails against his people’s betrayal – “Libya owes me everything!” – against the west which so recently feted him and, with no irony at all, and against his fellow Arab autocrats,those “pleasure-seeking gluttons”. Bullying, mercurial, and grandiose,Gadaffi contains an egomaniac’s contradictions: self-obsessed but craving approval, ruthless but oversensitive.
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Source: theguardian.com