The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s La confesión [The Confession]. This is another strange story from Aira, with most of the action taking place in a chair at a family reunion, where Count Orlov is seated. The Orlovs are descended from a distinguished Russian family that emigrated to Argentina. They are now … Read more
The latest addition to my website is José Carlos Llop‘s El mensajero de Argel [The Messenger from Algiers]. This novel, written by a writer known in Spain as much for his poetry as for his prose fiction, is something of a schizophrenic novel. It starts off by being about memory, loss of memory and recovered … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Una casa para siempre [A House Forever], a very inventive post-modern Spanish novel. The Great Greppi is a ventriloquist – he will go on to be very successful – and he tells his story, not in a continuous narration but with a series of vignettes of … Read more
Sadly, I have relatively few Greek writers on my site though I do have a few novels written by Greeks in my library and on my list. One of these is Menis Koumandareas. Only his short book Koula is available in English, though a few of his books have been translated into French. Sadly, he … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Irène Némirovsky‘s Les Chiens et les loups (The Dogs and the Wolves). This novel, unlike some of her others, is set, initially, in Kiev, where the Sinner family, a lower-middle class family, reside. Israel is a widower, bringing up a young daughter, Ada, and supporting his father-in-law. He … Read more
If you do not live the United States or did not get a chance to watch PBS’ Russia’s Open Book, I strongly urge you to do so if you have any interest in the contemporary novel. This film, funnily enough introduced by the very English (and bearded) Stephen Fry and narrated by the very English … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Irène Némirovsky‘s Suite française (Suite française), a novel written in 1940-41 but only published in 2004. This book is in two parts. The first part tells of a few people who live in Paris and what they do just before and just after the German invasion of France … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sebastiano Vassalli‘s Sebastiano Vassalli: Le due chiese [The Two Churches]. This is set in a fictitious part of Italy but what seems to be the Valle d’Aosta. Most of the action takes place between World War I to a period soon after World War II and focusses on … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sebastiano Vassalli‘s Marco e Mattio [Marco and Mattio]. Like other Vassalli novels this one is based on a real story, in this case a nineteenth century Italian shoe mender and charcoal burner called Mattio Lovat. Most of the action takes place at the end of the eighteenth and … Read more