tmn The latest addition to my website is Luis Arturo Ramos‘ Este era un gato [This Was a Cat]. This novel, which has not been translated into English, tells the story of Roger Copeland. He was part of the US troops that occupied Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914. While there, he met a whore called Teresa Triana … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fiston Mwanza Mujila‘s Tram 83 (Tram 83). As I say in my review, this is the noisiest novel I have ever read and if you don’t think that a novel can be noisy, read this one. It takes place in the major town in a place called merely … Read more
They have just announced the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize. They are: Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings Tom McCarthy: Satin Island Chigozie Obioma: The Fishermen Sunjeev Sahota: The Year of the Runaways Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life Two from the UK, two from … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz‘s Farinet ou la fausse monnaie [Farinet or the Forged Money]. Maurice Farinet, when young, befriended an old man, Sage, who had found a vein of gold in the mountains. When he died, it became Farinet’s. He uses the gold to make twenty franc coins. Given that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mathias Enard‘s Boussole (Compass). This is about one man, an Austrian musicologist called Franz Ritter, who is currently ill with an unspecified disease, who throws away the tablets his doctor gives him and lies awake at night, thinking about various things. These include his unrequited love for the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rabah Belamri‘s Le Soleil sous le tamis [The Sun Under the Screen]. This is an autobiographical novel of the author’s childhood in an Algerian village during the 1950s. Belamri is such an accomplished writer that what could have been a pedestrian account works very well. He divides his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alexandra Kleeman‘s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. I was just yesterday reading a story about eating fads. While this novel is concerned with eating and eating habits, it only tangentially deals with eating disorders. What it is primarily about is how the media focuses on … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Amélie Nothomb‘s Le crime du comte Neville [The Crime of Count Neville]. This is her twenty-fourth book in twenty-four years. She regularly produces a novel during the French rentrée and this one is this year’s offering. It will doubtlessly appear in English ere long. It is something of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jonathan Franzen‘s Purity. Inevitably, this book has caused much controversy and has been condemned for being sexist (which it partially is but no more than thousands of other novels), problematic, self-indulgent and probably all sorts of other crimes. Ignore the buzz and read the book. It is not … Read more
‘Tis the season for la rentrée, which, in France, refers both to going back to school at the beginning of the new school year but, more importantly, for us, the host of new books that are published around now, in time both for the prize-giving season and, presumably, the Christmas market. This is not unique … Read more