SOURCE: Campbell, Ewing. “Encountering the Other in The Fiction of Reality.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 9, no. 2 (summer 1989): 220-24.

In the following review, Campbell asserts that The Fiction of Reality is not a piece of criticism, but is, in fact, a novel. Campbell uses other examples from literature to prove that Ghose's experimentation with reality and language forms a basis for fiction of the word.

As I understand criticism it is, like philosophy and history, a kind of novel for the use of discreet and curious minds.

—Anatole France, The Literary Life

Unprimed by theory or tradition, unsupported by authority, ungoverned by regular ordinances, one must abandon habits and begin alone when addressing Zulfikar Ghose's Fiction of Reality. So where better to begin than with the title? The word fiction in its etymological sense means, not ungenuine, but the act of fashioning, from fictus, past participle of fingere, to...