For Americans weary of underwater mortgages and housing booms and busts, there is surely something novel in Venezuela's approach to its own housing crisis.
Surely the novel's most sinister presence is the hospital itself, Manhattan's Cedars of Lebanon, a behemoth so enormous it swallows up patients while their relatives wander, lost and disoriented, trying to find them.
There he finds his heartbroken sister Glory, surely the novel's true driving force, back home to care for her ailing father, embarrassed at "being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be".
Surely no other novel, ever, has offered a richer cast.
Indeed, Naipaul towers next to Conrad, whose work surely inspired this novel.
This novel surely belongs within that subgenre of Gothic literature associated with the persecuted woman.
Surely, Rushdie's novel, which had caused such offence to hundreds of millions of believers, deserved a similar fate?
Enacting this post-traumatic return, Cohen's novel surely needs to find itself repeatedly pulled back to powerful remembered descriptions of the men's experiences in Israel.
But it's that great Smike-thrashing scene that dominates any adaptation, as it surely dominates the novel itself: a compellingly horrible piece of injustice.
First published in 1989, and at last brought back into print this month by Gollancz, it is surely the best novel about rock-climbing ever written – though such a description drastically limits its achievement.
