tmn The latest addition to my website is Ersi Sotiropoulos‘ Τι μενει απο τη νυχτα (What’s Left of the Night). The novel tells of three days in June 1897 spent by Greek poet C(onstantine) P Cavafy and his older brother, John. The family has fallen on hard times, so money is tight. Cavafy himself struggles with … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Christoph Ransmayr‘s Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit [Cox or the Course of Time]. The hero of this book is Alister Cox, based on the very real James Cox. Unlike James Cox, Alister Cox travels to China to build clocks for the Chinese Emperor Qianlong. Qianlong is not … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hye Young-Pyun‘s 재와 빨강 (City of Ash and Red). This a grim Kafkaesque story about an unnamed man from an unnamed country, who works for a pesticide company. He is sent to the head office of the company, which is located in another country, where he barely speaks … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nicole Lundrigan‘s Thaw. The novel is set in the small Newfoundland town of Cupboard Cove and tells the story of two people who live there, as well as of their families. Tilley Gover is a sensitive boy with a loving mother but an aggressive and macho father and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hye Young-Pyun‘s 홀 (The Hole), a disturbing Korean novel about a paralysed man. Oghi has a successful career as a professor of cartography, though his wife has not been able to succeed at any career and nor have they have had any children. At the beginning of the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Embalse [Reservoir]. This is another first-class novel by Aira, telling about a couple from Buenos Aires holidaying in a remote Argentinian town by a lake with their young children. Martín, the husband, keeps finding strange things on his walks – large houses just near his he … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Dubravka Ugrešić‘s Forsiranje romana-reke (Fording the Stream of Consciousness). This is a wonderful, witty satire on literary conferences. The setting is a literary conference in Zagreb, while Yugoslavia was still a country, and Ugrešić manages to mock numerous nationalities and their foibles, but, not surprisingly, with a special … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ali Smith‘s Autumn. This is the first in Ali Smith’s four Seasons series of novels and, apparently, the first post-Brexit novel. It tells the story of Elisabeth Demand who, when a young child, lives next door to Daniel Gluck, a man sixty-nine years older than her, who becomes … Read more
Yesterday I wrote a post on Javier Pedro Zabala’s The Mad Patagonian in which I felt that the novel was not entirely what it purported to be, i.e. a translation from Zabala’s Spanish original. I showed, or tried to show, that there were no such people as Zabala, his wife and his translator and that … Read more
A couple of days ago, I posted a review of a book called The Mad Patagonian by an unknown Cuban author called Javier Pedro Zabala. The book was 1200+ pages long and while it certainly was not a bad book, it was not a great book. I did, however, enjoy reading it. For various reasons … Read more