The latest addition to my website is David Albahari‘s Kontrolni punkt (Checkpoint). The novel tells about a platoon of soldiers sent to man a barrier on the top of the hill. They have no idea what the barrier is for, where they are – even which country they are in – nor what they are … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Emmanuel Carrère‘s La Moustache (The Moustache). The unnamed hero of this novel decides one day to shave off his moustache to surprise his wife, Agnès. Not only does she not notice, she later insists that he never had a moustache. This previous lack of a moustache is later … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pat Barker‘s The Silence of the Girls. This is a feminist retelling of the Trojan War, based primarily on The Iliad. It is narrated mainly by Briseis, wife of King Mynes of Lyrnessus, an ally of Troy conquered by the Greeks before they conquer Troy. Briseis is captured … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wu Ming‘s 54 (54). Wu Ming is an Italian collective (five men) and this novel is as the title tells us, set primarily in 1954. It tells several separate stories, featuring real and fictitious characters, which intersect in unexpected ways at various points. Part of it is based … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yan Lianke‘s 日熄 (The Day the Sun Died). This tells the story of the village of Gaotian, which happens to be the village of the writer Yan Lianke, who has written books whose titles are similar to but not identical with the real Yan Lianke. It is narrated … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nicole Lundrigan‘s Unraveling Arva. Set in Newfoundland, Lundrigan’s home province, this novel tells the story of Arva House. Both parents drowned, her father, apparently, after having drunk too much and her mother by suicide. She is now looking after Old Man Crane, an elderly and sick man, when … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s La prueba (The Proof). This is another Aira novel where you wonder what is going happening for the first part and then it suddenly explodes. Marcia is a sixteen-year old girl, wandering through the Flores district of Buenos Aires. She is accosted by two punk women, … Read more
The latest additon to my website is Mariko Ōhara‘s ハイブリッド・チャイルド (Hybrid Child). This is a science fiction novel, the second in the University of Minnesota’s Parallel Futures series and tells the story of a rogue humanoid battle unit, #3, which is all-powerful, virtually indestructible and can assume the form of anything it eats. It hides … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kirmen Uribe‘s Bilbao-New York-Bilbao (Bilbao-New York-Bilbao). This is a Basque novel, which is not really a novel and is not really about travel between Bilbao and New York. Uribe describes his efforts to write a novel about his grandfather, a fisherman, the Basque painter, Aurelio Arteta and Arteta’s … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alfredo Navarro Salanga‘s The Birthing of Hannibal Valdez This short novel from the Philippines tells the story not so much of Hannibal Valdez but of his grandfather, Leon. Leon’s daughter-in-law, daughter of one of his tenants, is about to give birth to a child. Leon is sure that … Read more