SOURCE: Hashmi, Alamgir. Review of Redemption, by Tariq Ali. World Literature Today 66, no. 1 (winter 1992): 210-11.

In the following review, Hashmi outlines the major themes of Redemption.

Tariq Ali comes to fiction from a respectable writing career in politics, history, biography, and, most recently, stage drama with a sharp focus on the contemporary world. On Christmas Eve 1989, in Paris, [in Redemption,] as the seventy-year-old Trotskyist patriarch Ezra Einstein watches on TV a Ceauşescu executioner make the sign of the cross, he seems even to forget the bliss of his late married life, he whose “fingers had rested more often on the keys and body of his antique writing aid [his fifty-five-year-old typewriter] than on the more intimate sections of the female anatomy.” He issues a letter forthwith to convene a congress to discuss the world situation following the collapse of the East European regimes and the changes in...