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Rating: 
Summary: A novel of striking insight and power.
Review: "The Reluctant Agent" is Phillip Kurata's first novel, but in its lean, evocative writing and uncluttered structure, you'd never guess it was the work of a first-timer. In leading Habib ben Hamed, a feckless Tunisian intellectual, to his inexorable fate during the political unrest of the 1960s, Kurata brings home two major truths: that in times of injustice, the war between conscience and personal safety is usually unwinnable; and that revolutions eat not only their young, but anyone in their paths. Kurata has been compared with Graham Greene and Albert Camus; in his detailed insight into how dictatorships work, he obviously knows his Orwell and Arthur Koestler as well. In its persuasive portrayal of the collision between modernism and traditional Islam, "The Reluctant Agent" is urgently pertinent reading in 2002. The deceptively simple yet compelling story keeps you turning the pages to the final paragraph, which is breathtaking in its lethal spareness. "The Reluctant Agent" is a must-read for anyone interested in the literature of revolution and politics.
Rating:
Summary: A novel of striking insight and power.
Review: "The Reluctant Agent" is Phillip Kurata's first novel, but in its lean, evocative writing and uncluttered structure, you'd never guess it was the work of a first-timer. In leading Habib ben Hamed, a feckless Tunisian intellectual, to his inexorable fate during the political unrest of the 1960s, Kurata brings home two major truths: that in times of injustice, the war between conscience and personal safety is usually unwinnable; and that revolutions eat not only their young, but anyone in their paths. Kurata has been compared with Graham Greene and Albert Camus; in his detailed insight into how dictatorships work, he obviously knows his Orwell and Arthur Koestler as well. In its persuasive portrayal of the collision between modernism and traditional Islam, "The Reluctant Agent" is urgently pertinent reading in 2002. The deceptively simple yet compelling story keeps you turning the pages to the final paragraph, which is breathtaking in its lethal spareness. "The Reluctant Agent" is a must-read for anyone interested in the literature of revolution and politics.
Rating:
Summary: Kurata is on the mark.
Review: Anyone who ever spent time in a third world country in the post colonial cold war era will recognize the characters and settings in Phillip Kurata's The Reluctant Agent. The country is Tunisia shortly after its independence and Habib Ben Hamed is caught between his own world and that of the former French colonizer. Unfortunately Habib is at home in neither and becomes caught up in a postcolonial drama he cannot fully comprehend nor control. The political rhetoric is of socialism and progress but the reality is that of power and domination as the world of the colonizer gives way to that of the local ruling class. Reminiscent of Graeme Green's best work Kurata draws the reader into a rich psychological world of men and women caught up in historical forces that sweep them along to inevitable endings. The exotic settings of North Africa, colorfully described in clean declarative prose, amplify the inner turmoil of a hapless Habib caught between his heart's desire and the cruel reality that denies it. My own postcolonial third world experience was in Somalia at the end of the cold war but the settings and characters differed little from those described in Kurata's novel. I saw many Somalis draw sustenance from their former colonizer's culture even as they moved quickly to their own destruction crushed between the early socialist rhetoric of their postcolonial freedom and the twin barbarisms of dictatorship and cold war politics. Many of today's headlines stem from the cold war and postcolonial issues still unfolding in developing countries. Thus, Habib's dilemma is as relevant today as it was twenty to twenty-five years ago. Kurata, who lived in Tunis, saw to the core and created a world that allows the rest of us to see it too.
Rating:
Summary: Kurata is on the mark.
Review: Anyone who ever spent time in a third world country in the post colonial cold war era will recognize the characters and settings in Phillip Kurata's The Reluctant Agent. The country is Tunisia shortly after its independence and Habib Ben Hamed is caught between his own world and that of the former French colonizer. Unfortunately Habib is at home in neither and becomes caught up in a postcolonial drama he cannot fully comprehend nor control. The political rhetoric is of socialism and progress but the reality is that of power and domination as the world of the colonizer gives way to that of the local ruling class. Reminiscent of Graeme Green's best work Kurata draws the reader into a rich psychological world of men and women caught up in historical forces that sweep them along to inevitable endings. The exotic settings of North Africa, colorfully described in clean declarative prose, amplify the inner turmoil of a hapless Habib caught between his heart's desire and the cruel reality that denies it. My own postcolonial third world experience was in Somalia at the end of the cold war but the settings and characters differed little from those described in Kurata's novel. I saw many Somalis draw sustenance from their former colonizer's culture even as they moved quickly to their own destruction crushed between the early socialist rhetoric of their postcolonial freedom and the twin barbarisms of dictatorship and cold war politics. Many of today's headlines stem from the cold war and postcolonial issues still unfolding in developing countries. Thus, Habib's dilemma is as relevant today as it was twenty to twenty-five years ago. Kurata, who lived in Tunis, saw to the core and created a world that allows the rest of us to see it too.
Rating: 
Summary: The Reluctant Agent: A Spellbinding Read
Review: I'm an occasional reader of fiction spending much of my time scanning newspaper articles and opinion pieces dealing with U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. So Phillip Kurata's first novel, The Reluctant Agent, though set in the '60's of a turbulent Tunisia, was a real find as it addresses contemporary issues of cultural and political conflict in a repressive Islamic society. Ben Hamed is the protagonist, an unlikely hero, an Arabic 'everyman' who just wants the good things in life but finds himself caught up in an escalating spiral of intrigue and danger in order to survive. Kurata has an artist's eye for background detail and character development. The story builds and carries the reader forward to what becomes an extremely powerful ending.
Rating:
Summary: Significant New Work
Review: Phillip Kurata's vivid prose style and deep sociopolitical insight capture the essential conflict of post-colonial Tunisia; but more than that this spectacular literary debut speaks to an eternal question confronted by every man and woman: How do I live truthfully and what price do I pay for compromising my integrity? Kurata makes these costs explicit through richly drawn characters and the consequences their actions bring about. This novel succeeds because, unlike so much contemporary fiction, it possesses a moral center that pulls the reader into the lives and locale of a distant yet all too familiar place. It is fair to compare "The Reluctant Agent" to works by Lampedusa, Hemingway, Koestler and Solzhenitsyn. I hope there will be an encore performance.
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