* At the beginning of Thomas Keneally's novel entitled Towards Asmara, we can read: "Thomas Keneally bagan writing in 1964. His novels include [...] SCHINDLER'S ARK (which won the 1982 Booker Prize and has sold more copies than any other Booker prize-winner before or since)." The book was first issued in 1989 but copyrighted in 1988. This was written in 1990 on the Coronet edition (Hodder & Stroughton) of Towards Asmara, long before the 1982 novel was turned into a movie by Spilberg, renamed Schindler's List, and presented to the world audience (by the Ford Compnay, among others) as a non-fiction, which it is not. Keneally has developped a technique of borrowing from facts to create fiction. In this book on the Erythrean guerillas, written after the author actually went to Erythrea and Sudan, he insists on disclaiming the reality of his portraits. He says : "They merely stand as the authors poor simulacra for those folk." (p. 11) The expression is good and could be extended far out beyond Keneally's figures, POOR SIMULACRA...