The latest addition to my website is Rafael Chirbes‘ Paris-Austerlitz. Chirbes had started this book in 1996, put it aside and then returned to it later, only finishing it last year, shortly before he died. It is a semi-autobiographical account of a homosexual relationship between a young bourgeois Spanish painter and a much older working-class … Read more
This blog and the associated website are called Modern Novel for a very good and obvious reason: they are about the modern novel. Nearly all reviews are reviews of literary novels. However, every so often a short story or non-fiction work creeps in. This non-fiction work – The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jorge Ibargüengoitia‘s Los relámpagos de agosto (The Lightning of August), a very funny novel whcih ruthlessly satirises the memoirs of Mexican Civil War generals and the generals themselves. This novel is in the form of the memoirs of a fictitious Civil War general, called José Guadalupe Arroyo. He … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mario Vargas Llosa‘s Cinco Esquinas [Five Corners]. Sadly this book confirms what we have known for a while, namely that Vargas Llosa’s talents have waned as he has got older. As you can see from the cover at left, soft-core porn features in the book (the newspaper headline … Read more
Those of you of a certain age and, probably, British, may remember a song by the Vapors called Turning Japanese, with the chorus I’m turning Japanese I think I’m turning Japanese I really think so. After having read twenty Japanese novels in a row, eaten several meals of sushi, drunk loads of miso soup and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Risa Wataya‘s 勝手にふるえてろ [Tremble All You Want]. This is the first-person story of the twenty-six year old Yoshika Etô, virgin, loner, and deeply in love with a young man she knew in high school but whom she has not seen for several years. Kirishima Ni, one of her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kaori Ekuni‘s きらきらひかる (Twinkle Twinkle). This is another quirky novel about a quirky relationship. In this case Shoko, an emotionally unstable woman, who is a borderline alcoholic, is married to Mutsuki, a homosexual. Both are aware of the other’s situation. However, Shoko had been advised to get married … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiromi Kawakami‘s 先生の鞄 (US: The Briefcase; UK: Strange Weather in Tokyo)/ This is the quirky tale of the relationship between a thirty-seven year old woman, Tsukiko, and her high school Japanese teacher, some thirty years her senior, whom she addresses as Sensei, the honorific term used by the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fumio Niwa‘s 菩提樹 (The Buddha Tree). This is a long novel, set in a Buddhist temple, with a detailed description of the temple and its rituals (Niwa descended from a long line of priests and trained as a priest before abandoning the profession to become a writer). However, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Saiichi Maruya‘s 笹まくら (Grass for My Pillow). This is an excellent novel about a somewhat taboo subject in Japan: draft desertion. Shokichi Hamada is currently the assistant chief clerk in the registry office of a university. However, during the war, he decided not to serve and travelled around … Read more