The latest addition to my website is Marlen Haushofer‘s Die Wand (The Wall). The story tells of an unnamed woman who is to stay with friends in a hunting lodge at the edge of the Austrian Alps. The plan is that she will arrive early and they will join her in the evening. They do … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Victor Pelevin‘s Чапаев и Пустота (UK: The Clay Machine-Gun; US: Buddha’s Little Finger). This is another wonderful, witty, post-modernist novel from Pelevin. Pyotr Voyd, the narrator, is not sure when he lives. He is a commissar in 1919 to Vasily Chapayev, Soviet hero and subject of the book … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kate Atkinson‘s A God in Ruins. This is a follow-up to her quirky Life After Life. That book featured Ursula Todd. This book, which also features Ursula Todd to some degree, is primarily about her younger brother, Ted, and his daughter Viola. Apart from a little bit at … Read more
The latest addition to my website is James Salter‘s A Sport and a Pastime. The novel is set in France, specifically Paris and Autun, and is narrated by a self-confessed unreliable narrator. He has borrowed the house of Parisian friends in Autun, where he is staying on his own, lusting unsuccessfully after the divorcee Mme … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jowhor Ile‘s And After Many Days. This is Ile’s first novel and very well written for a first novel. The story involves the Utu family, who live in Port Harcourt, and consists of Benedict (Bendic), a lawyer, his wife, Ma, a teacher and their two sons, Paul and … Read more
I have just returned from a distinctly unliterary holiday in South Africa and Zimbabwe, with little literary to report. The South Africans I talked to were fairly ignorant of their own literature and professed to being far more interested in the great outdoors or cricket than in books. (For those more concerned with the Panthers … Read more
I was a long time subscriber to the French literary magazine La Quinzaine Littéraire, founded by the wonderful writer and editor Maurice Nadeau, who died in 2013 aged 102! He was writing and contributing till almost the end. After his death, financial troubles which had occurred before Nadeau’s death re-emerged and publication was suspended for … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Abdulaziz Al-Farsi‘s تبكي الأرض– يضحك زحل (Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs), the first Omani novel on my website. It is a gently mocking satire of a village in Oman where the majority of people seem to be conspiring against others, have guilty secrets which are only gradually revealed (to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Cyprian Ekwensi‘s Survive the Peace. This novel is set at the end of the Biafran War. James Odugo is a radio journalist who has been travelling around Biafra, broadcasting news of the war, with the radio station continually having to move as the Federals get closer. James’ wife … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alexander Chayanov‘s Путешествие моего брата Алексея в страну крестьянской утопии (The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia). This is a 1920 novel set in 1984 (yes, thirty-nine years before George Orwell got there), written by a well-respected Soviet agricultural economist, whose political views … Read more