The latest addition to my website is Norah Lange‘s Personas en la sala (People in the Room). This is the second Lange book I have read but the first to be published in English, sixty-eight years after it first appeared in Spanish. It tells the story of a seventeen-year old woman who observes the three … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miklós Szentkuthy‘s Barokk Róbert [Robert Baroque]. Though only published three years after his death, this is an early work, written when he was eighteen (and, apparently, never revised or even reread). It is essentially an autobiographical work about his eighteenth year and includes his home and school life, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Emiliano Monge‘s El cielo árido (The Arid Sky). This novels tells the story of Germán Alcántara Carnero, known as El Gringo, from conception in 1901 to death in 1981. El Gringo is a local boss and is happy to use whatever violence he needs to keep the local … Read more
The latest addition to my website is François Bon‘s L’enterrement [The Funeral]. This short novel/long story tells of the unnamed narrator’s visit to a remote village in the Vendée region of France for the funeral of Alain, an old friend. We do not know how Alain died but we suspect it was suicide. The narrator … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gine Cornelia Pedersen‘s Null (Zero). This is Pedersen’s first (of two) novels and she has since made a name for herself as a TV star in Norway. This novel tells the story of a Norwegian girl, aged ten at the start of the novel and aged twenty-one by … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergio Pitol‘s El tañido de una flauta [The Tune of a Flute]. The basic plot concerns an unnamed Mexican film director/producer who, in his younger days, had made a film about Carlos Ibarra, his friend and a budding novelist. Ibarra has drifted around the world, never finishing his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Dag Solstad‘s Armand V. (Armand V.). Armand is a Norwegian diplomat and we follow his life and career in this novel which is not a novel but merely the footnotes to a novel as the author abandoned the actual novel for various reasons. Armand was appointed an ambassador … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Germán Espinosa‘s Sinfonía desde el nuevo mundo [Symphony from the New World]. It tells the story of Victorien Fontenier, a French army officer who has fled from Waterloo after the defeat and, at the suggestion of his prospective father-in-law, goes off to Jamaica to deliver guns to Haiti. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Amit Chaudhuri‘s Odysseus Abroad. It is a day (19 July 1985) in the life of Ananda Sen, an Indian studying English literature at the University of London. During the day, he visits his tutor (to whom he has sent some of his poetry) and goes out with his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Simon Sellars‘ Applied Ballardianism: Memoir From a Parallel Universe. This novel is an example of theory-fiction, in that it is written as a novel, indeed, is a novel, but, at the same time, as the title tells us, is something of a critique or study of the work … Read more