The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ La asesina ilustrada [The Illustrated Murderess]. This is a strange story about a story, called La asesina ilustrada, which seems to have the effect that those who read it, die. The key person is Elena Villena. It is she who wrote the story, she who is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Javier Cercas‘ El Impostor [The Impostor]. This is what Cercas describes as a novel without fiction, i.e a novel based on a real life person and/or events. In this case, it is about the very real Enric Marco, a man who had been the charismatic and hard-working head … Read more
The latest addition to my website is José Carlos Llop‘s El mensajero de Argel [The Messenger from Algiers]. This novel, written by a writer known in Spain as much for his poetry as for his prose fiction, is something of a schizophrenic novel. It starts off by being about memory, loss of memory and recovered … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Una casa para siempre [A House Forever], a very inventive post-modern Spanish novel. The Great Greppi is a ventriloquist – he will go on to be very successful – and he tells his story, not in a continuous narration but with a series of vignettes of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Elena Quiroga‘s Presente profundo [Profound Present]. This is a very intelligent novel on death, time and life. Rubén is a doctor and comes across two Galician women who both kill themselves. Neither are in any way connected, apart from their sex and nationality. Indeed, while he knew one … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Carmen Amoraga‘s La vida era eso [Such Was Life]. This is another book in my reading of this year’s literary prize winners/shortlisted books. This book won Spain’s Nadal Prize. It tells the story of Giuliana di Benedetto, an Argentinian of Italian origin who lives in Spain. At the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lucia Etxebarría‘s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes [Beatrice and the Heavenly Bodies]. This is the story of a young Spanish woman, Beatriz de la Haya, and her life at around the age of twenty. For a while she lives with Mónica, in the house of Mónica’s parents, who … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Javier Marías‘ Así empieza lo malo [Thus Bad Begins]. This is another excellent novel from Marías about marital relations, the enduring effect of the Civil War and the Franco era on contemporary Spain and betrayal and deceit. Juan de Vere is now around fifty but tells of events … Read more
Spanish author Ana María Matute has died at the age of 88. I have four of her books on my website, three of which have been translated into English. I particularly enjoyed Paraíso inhabitado [Uninhabited Paradise], which you can read in Polish and Turkish, amongst other languages, but not in English. Her Civil War trilogy, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rafael Chirbes‘ En la orilla [On the Shore]. This book was generally agreed by Spanish critics to be the best Spanish novel of 2013 and also the best novel on the Spanish economic crisis. As is usual with Chirbes, plot is not key to this book; indeed, there … Read more