The latest addition to my website is Hans Scherfig‘s Den forsvundne fuldmægtig (The Missing Bureaucrat). This novel takes the form of a detective story, when two men in Copenhagen are found missing within a short while of one another. The first is a respected civil servant, working in the War Department, Teodor Amsted, a man … Read more
The new Folio Prize has announced an inaugural short list of eight writers, which is bound to cause some controversy. Five of the writers are from the US, one from Canada, one from England and one from Ireland. The prize was set up as something of a response to the Man Booker Prize, not least … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness, the first in Durrell’s Avignon Quintet. It starts with the apparent suicide of Piers de Nogaret, descendant of Guillaume de Nogaret, the man who, in 1307, arrested many of the Templars. Piers’ friend and brother-in-law, Bruce Drexel, a doctor in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jun’ichiro Tanizaki‘s 猫と庄造と二人の女 (A Cat, A Man and Two Women). I read some Tanizaki many years ago so now is the time to reread those ones I read before and read those, like this one, I had not read before. This is certainly not one of his greatest … Read more
As we are completely out of the Nobel Prize for Literature season and, I would hope, no-one else is discussing the matter, I thought it would be time for me to put in my somewhat controversial proposal. When listening to rock music, I have now and then thought that some of the better songwriters would, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marie Darrieussecq‘s Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes [You Should Love Men a Lot]. This book has not yet been translated into English but almost certainly will be. It tells the story of Solange, whom we met in her previous book Clèves (All the Way). She is now … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marie Darrieussecq‘s Tom est mort (Tom is Dead). This is (fictitious) tale of a woman whose four-and-a-half year old son dies in an accident – we are not given the details till the end of the book – and what happens to her afterwards. She is writing ten … Read more
The Amazon editors have produced a list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime, with an associated Goodreads’ 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime: Readers’ Picks (Amazon, of course, own Goodreads). (Note that this list is on US Amazon; it does not appear to be on the other Amazons.) I enjoy a good … Read more
The Guardian had an article about the most significant historical/literary figures of all time. To do this, they claim to use a principled assessment of a person’s achievements, whatever that may mean. They examine various sources but their primary source is Wikipedia where they look for length of article, Google Page rank and number of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antonio Muñoz Molina‘s La noche de los tiempos (UK: The Depths of Time; US: In the Night of Time), a very long book telling the story of a successful architect from a relatively poor background during the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War and the period … Read more