The latest addition to my website is Soledad Puértolas‘ Burdeos (Bordeaux). The novel tells three stories, with several of the characters appearing in two or all three stories. The first two are set in Bordeaux, with the third set in Bordeaux and elsewhere. The characters are nearly all all well-to-do bourgeoisie. The main theme of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s El volante [The Flyer]. This is another novel from Aira which starts in a fairly straightforward manner and then veers off, concluding with something of an apocalyptic ending. Norma Traversini is a teacher of dramatic arts, who is writing a flyer to be distributed around the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Irina Odoevtseva:‘s Изольда (Isolde). This book was first published in 1929 and was condemned by Odoevtseva’s fellow Russian émigré writers, including Nabokov, as it dealt with teenage sex and nihilism and was therefore clearly immoral. It tells the story of a Russian émigré family in Biarritz in the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sara Stridsberg‘s Drömfakulteten (UK: Faculty of Dreams; US: Valerie) . The US title – Valerie – gives a much better idea of the subject than the UK one (a literal translation of the Swedish original), as the novel is about Valerie Solanas, who is known for two things: … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paul Gadenne‘s Les Hauts-Quartiers [The Upper Districts]. This novel was published seventeen years after Gadenne’s death and has not been translated into any other language. It is long (800 pages) and rambling. It tells the story of Didier Aubert, a young man clearly based on the author. We … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mircea Cărtărescu‘s Orbitor Vol 1, Aripa stângă (Blinding – The Left Wing), the first book in a trilogy (and the only one of the three translated into English). This is an intensely visionary book, far more intense than any other book you are likely to read, Dante included. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yuz Aleshkovsky‘s Николай Николаевич (Nikolai Nikolaevich) and Маскировка (Camouflage), published in the same volume in both Russian and English. Both are distinguished by vicious anti-Soviet satire and the extensive use of obscenities. Николай Николаевич (Nikolai Nikolaevich) is about the eponymous hero, a former prisoner, who finds work first … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Shi Tiesheng‘s 我的丁一之旅 (My Travels in Ding Yi). This was Shi Tiesheng’s final book and he packed a lot into it. The story is told by a spirit who inhabits the bodies of humans. He first started with Adam in the Garden of Eden and still loves Eve, … Read more
While we had visited nearby Charleston, home of the Bloomsbury set a couple of times, we had never visited nearby (six miles distance) Monk’s House. till now Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought the simple cottage in 1919. They had been married seven years. Virginia wrote four of her best-known books there: Mrs. Dalloway, To the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Andrej Nikolaidis‘The Olcinium Trilogy ((Sin (The Son), Dolazak (The Coming), Devet (Till Kingdom Come)). This is a superb trilogy of novels, related but separate, about life in contemporary Montenegro. We follow three separate stories each one fairly grim, exposing the underbelly of post-Yugoslavia Montenegro, with a host of … Read more