The latest addition to my website is Mircea Cărtărescu‘s Levantul [The Levant]. This is a mock epic, which, in the original Romanian was written primarily in verse form, but, for the translations (French, Italian, Spanish and Swedish but not English) was primarily converted to prose, with some verse. It tells of the adventures of a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mario Vargas Llosa‘s Tiempos recios [Hard Times]. The novel deals with the overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, by Guatemalan forces, supported by the CIA and the US Ambassador to Guatemala. He was primarily overthrown because he had wanted to tax the United … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rodrigo Fresán‘s La parte inventada (The Invented Part). This is a long, rambling novel, the first of the trilogy, about Fresán’s favourite subject – writers and writing. We follow the story of the Writer and his career, from his childhood to his later life, when his writing is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miloš Crnjanski‘s Roman o Londonu [London Novel]. This is a long and sad tale, based on Crnjanski’s own life, about a Russian prince, Nikolai Rodionovich Repnin, and his wife, Nadia,in exile in London. They had fled Crimea in 1922 and travelled around Europe but, because of World War … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nicolás Giacobone‘s El cuaderno tachado (The Crossed-Out Notebook). Giacabone is a scriptwriter so it is not surprising that his first novel tells the story of a scriptwriter, Pablo Betances. Pablo had wanted to be a musician but did not make it so became a writer and then a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eduardo Mendoza‘s La ciudad de los prodigios (The City of Marvels). This is something of an epic novel, following both the story of the city of Barcelona from the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition to the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition as well as following the story of Onofre Bouvila. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ian McEwan‘s The Cockroach, a satire on Brexit. He uses two clever twists in the book. The first is from Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). We start off with the eponymous cockroach who metamorphosises into the prime minister, a thinly disguised Boris Johnson, though, at the time of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick Modiano‘s Rue des Boutiques obscures (Missing Person). It tells the story of Guy Roland, a man living in the 1960s who has no idea who he is. He has been working as the assistant for a private detective who has now retired. As a result, Roland concentrates … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Talasbek Asemkulov‘s Талтус (Полдень) (A Life at Noon). Talasbek Asemkulov is a Kazakh dombra player and has helped to revive the tradition, which had almost died, in Kazakhstan. This is an autobiographical novel. We follow the childhood and youth of Azhigerei, our hero, but we also learn of … Read more
I have just returned from a cruise down the Danube, into the Black Sea and up the Dnieper. Though this was not the purpose, there was a lot to see of literary interest. Only a small part of the journey was in Romania but we did stop at Constanța. In Roman times, Constanța was known … Read more