tmn The latest addition to my website is Kazuo Ishiguro‘s The Buried Giant. This book has received a lot of criticism, not least because it is major departure for Ishiguro as it is, to all intents and purposes, a Lord of the Rings/Arthurian legend-style fantasy. Set in the fifth/sixth century, it tells of the quest of … Read more
It was my plan to read around twenty Russian novels one after the other but, in the meantime, a few books arrived that I really wanted to read, so there is now a brief interruption to the Russian reading, which will be resumed shortly. The latest addition to my website is Máirtín Ó Cadhain‘s Cré … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zakhar Prilepin‘s Санькя (Sankya). Sankya, invariably called Sasha in this book, is a young Russian, a former military man who belongs to a group called the Founding Fathers, which is opposed to the ruling authorities in Russia, i.e. to Putin, though he is not mentioned by name. Sasha … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ludmila Ulitskaya‘s Даниэль Штайн, переводчик (Daniel Stein, Interpreter). This is a quasi-hagiographic fictionalisation of the story of Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who, during the war joined the Gestapo to help his fellow Jews escape the Nazis and later joined the Soviet NKVD for similar reasons. During the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Andrei Bitov‘s Преподаватель симметрии (The Symmetry Teacher). This is a wonderful novel, nominally starting with a Russian man trying to reconstruct a story he read some time ago in English (which he does not speak very well), though we do not get to the reconstructed novel till well … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gaito Gazdanov‘s Вечер у Клэр (An Evening with Claire). This was Gazdanov’s first novel, written when he was only twenty-six and living in Paris, after escaping from revolutionary Russia, via Istanbul. The book, which has been called Proustian, is essentially autobiographical, telling the story of Kolya Sosedov, as … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vladislav Otroshenko‘s Приложение к фотоальбому (Addendum to a Photo Album). This a hilarious and somewhat fanciful account of a Cossack family of thirteen brothers, the children of Annushka and (with one exception) Malakh. The one exception is the somewhat blustering Semion, the eleventh son, who is conceived and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vasily Golovanov‘s Остров или Оправдание бессмысленных путешествий [Island or A Justification for Meaningless Travel]. This is a wonderful non-fiction novel, in which the author describes his fascination with and his visits to Kolguyev Island, a remote island off the coast of Northern Russia. Professionally he has worked as … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mikhail Shishkin‘s Взятие Измаила [The Taking of Izmail]. This is one of his earlier novels, not (yet?) translated into English but, in my view more enjoyable than his two novels that have been translated into English. The blurb on the back of the French edition (which I read) … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mikhail Shishkin‘s Письмовник (The Light and the Dark). It tells the story of two lovers, Volodya and Sasha, apparently writing letters to one another though, as we eventually learn, they appear to be living a hundred years apart. He is a soldier, appointed to be staff clerk, in … Read more