The latest addition to my website is Jorge Ibargüengoitia‘s Dos crímenes (Two Crimes). This is another mocking satire of Mexican mores by Ibargüengoitia, this time somewhat subverting the conventional detective story and taking as its premise that, perhaps inevitably, that the dividing line between the police and the criminals is thin to non-existent. Marcos González … Read more
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