The latest addition to my website is Gib Mihăescu‘s Donna Alba. Our hero, Mihai Aspru, has a colourful early life , running away, working on ships and trying to join the Foreign Legion in 1915. Back home he joins the Romanian army in World War I but survives, though his father, a doctor, dies. Back … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vintila Hori‘s Dieu est né en exil (God Was Born in Exile). This is the fourth book on my website about Ovid’s exile but the first by a Romanian. Ovid was exiled by Emperor Augustus in 9 A.D. to Tomis which is now Constanța in modern-day Romania.The book … Read more
I have finally added a subscription feature to this blog. Yes, I know that I should have done it years ago but better late than never. You will find it to the right of any blog post, below the Search and above the Archives. See illustration to left (don’t try and use this one as … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Camil Petrescu‘s Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război [The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War]. This is a love story and a war story. Stefan Gheorghidiu meets a woman at university. They fall in love and get married. At first all goes well … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Magda Cârneci‘s FEM (FEM). This is nominally a series of stories told Scheherazade-like by an unnamed woman to her unnamed and useless, about-to-be-dumped boyfriend. However, the stories are not Aladdin or Sindbad the Sailor but tell of her life, focussing as much on the images and impressions as … Read more
Regularly, at around this time of the year, I concentrate on reading books from just one nationality and this year it is Romania. For most Western readers who know anything about Romanian literature, the writers they have heard of or even read will be expatriates, sometimes, perhaps, without our readers being aware that they were … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vítězslav Nezval‘s Žena v množném čísle (Woman in the Plural). This is not even vaguely a novel but,rather, a collection of pieces – poetry, short prose pieces and a drama – all of which are surrealistic in nature, as Nezval was on one of, if not the leading … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vítězslav Nezval‘s Valérie a týden divů (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) . Nezval was a committed surrealist, friends with André Breton and other surrealists when he wrote this book in 1932 (thirteen years before it was finally published in Czech). It is a spoof Gothic novel with … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Дебютант (Untraceable). This is a story inspired by but not based on the Salisbury poisonings when Russian agents used the nerve agent Novichok to try and kill a former Russian double agent and his daughter. This novel tells of a scientist who develops a similar agent, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Minae Mizumura‘s 私小説 from left to right (An I-Novel). This book was written and published before her other two novels published in English and, unusually, contains lots of English words and is written horizontally (as the Japanese title tells us) and not vertically as is normal in Japanese. … Read more