tmn The latest addition to my website is Pola Oloixarac‘s Las constelaciones oscuras (Dark Constellations). This novel tells the story of stunning scientific discoveries and inventions, in the field of botany, genetics and information technology, from 1882 to some time in the not too distant future. In all cases, the discoveries/inventions lead to a new way … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s La cena (Dinner). This is Aira’s zombie novel. The narrator, a sixty-year old, never married bankrupt man, living with his mother on her pension, and the mother go to dinner with a friend. The mother and friend gossip about the people in the town, past and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paul Gadenne‘s Rue profonde [The Deep Street]. This is strange, short novel about an unnamed poet, living in a garret in Paris, who is writing a short poem, something he will continue to do throughout the book. He struggles with this poem, influenced by various images (the shadow … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mario Benedetti‘s Primavera con una esquina rota (Springtime in a Broken Mirror). This is only the second of Benedetti’s novels to appear in English. Another one will appear in June 2019. This one is set in the 1970s when the military have taken over power in Uruguay and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mo Yan‘s 蛙 (Frog). The basic theme of this novel is family planning and, in particular, the Chinese one-child policy. As usual the novel is set in Northeast Gaomi Township, the fictionalised version of Mo Yan’s hometown. We follow the narrator, Wan Zu, also known as Xiaopiao and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Гусь Фриц (The Goose Fritz). We follow Kirill, a Russian living in the contemporary period, who, under the influence of his grandmother, becomes interested in his ancestors, who were of German origin. He tracks down their stories, going back to the late eighteenth century, how they … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miguel Ildefonso‘s Hotel Lima [Hotel Lima]. Our hero/narrator is called Dante and we follow him in his journey underground, though his underground is merely the seedier parts of Lima, where he meets prostitutes, drug addicts, strange women and, in particular, poètes maudits. He comes in contact with an … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Diamela Eltit‘s Vaca sagrada (Sacred Cow). This is a feminist, post-modern novel by a Chilean writer who stayed in Chile during the Pinochet regime. She tells the story of a woman who has two messy, violent relationships, with violence on both sides, showing indirectly, in the relationships, the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Olga Grjasnowa‘s Gott ist nicht schüchtern (City of Jasmine). Grjasnowa is an Azerbaijan-born German national, married to a Syrian. This novel primarily takes place during the recent Syrian Civil War. We follow the fate of three Syrians caught up in it. Hammoudi has studied medicine in Paris and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Khushwant Singh‘s I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale. This novel is set in 1942-1943 in Amritsar. Buta Singh is the paterfamilias of a Sikh family and also the chief magistrate, the most important Indian official in the region, subordinate to the twenty-eight year old British Deputy Commissioner, Taylor, … Read more