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 César Aira‘s El pequeño monje budista (The Little Buddhist Monk). This, as is usual with Aira, starts off reasonably conventionally and then gradually gets stranger and stranger. The eponymous very little monk is Korean and longs to go abroad but, as a mendicant monk, cannot afford to do … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Prins, his most recent work to date. The narrator is a writer of Gothic novels, a job that pays well because they sell well but a job he seems to hate. However, he does not know what else he could do with his time. After considering … 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 César Aira‘s La prueba (The Proof). This is another Aira novel where you wonder what is going happening for the first part and then it suddenly explodes. Marcia is a sixteen-year old girl, wandering through the Flores district of Buenos Aires. She is accosted by two punk women, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Norah Lange‘s Personas en la sala (People in the Room). This is the second Lange book I have read but the first to be published in English, sixty-eight years after it first appeared in Spanish. It tells the story of a seventeen-year old woman who observes the three … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s Los fantasmas (Ghosts). The novel is set in a high-rise building in Buenos Aires, where expensive flats are being built for the well-to-do but which is still not finished. A Chilean family, the Viñas, who act as caretakers, lives in the building. The story is set … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s El santo [The Saint], one of his more recent novels, somewhat longer than many of his previous ones and not yet translated into English. It tells the story of an unnamed priest in medieval Catalonia who is considered a saint. When he plans to retire to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jorge Barón Biza‘s El desierto y su semilla (The Desert and Its Seed). This is a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, telling of the grim events that happened in the author’s family. Barón Biza’s father threw acid in the face of his wife (while they were discussing divorce with … Read more