The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Lamees Naji, the third Sharp novel published this year and the third I have reviewed in the past couple of weeks. This one is different from the other two. While it is certainly experimental, on the surface it seems quite mundane. We follow the life of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Edmundo Paz Soldán‘s El delirio de Turing (Turing’s Delirium), only the second Bolivian novel on my site. This one is set during the 2000 Cochabamba protests against increases in water prices following privatisation, though disguised as the increase in electricity prices following privatisation, in the fictitious town of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jonathan Coe‘s Number 11. This is a sort of an update to Coe’s What a Carve Up! (US: The Winshaw Legacy). The former book attacks Thatcherism and this book attacks the current state of contemporary Britain, though far less savagely and not focussed on the prime minister but … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mouloud Mammeri‘s La Colline Oubliée [The Forgotten Hill], one of the many Algerian novels sadly not translated into English. This one is about an Algerian village in the period leading up to World War II and during that war. Mokrane is the main character and we follow his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Quin Again. Though subtitled and other stories, it reads as a novel as all but one of the stories is about the same character, albeit with a different name on a couple of occasions. He is Elijah Doodles McMaster aka Douglas Moog. He is a habitual … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s To Wetumpka. This is, inevitably, another experimental novel from Sharp, with a bleak view of the contemporary world, albeit touched with some humour. Clifford Tollinger has decided to escape from London and go the dreary seaside town of Lowestoft, on the East coast of England. One … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Anak Agung Pandji Tisna‘s Sukreni Gadis Bali (The Rape of Sukreni), the first Balinese novel on my website. Men Negara owns a food stall in a small Balinese village and uses her very attractive daughter, Ni Negari, to attract male customers. The police chief, Madé Tusan, who has … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ El viaje vertical [The Vertical Voyage], one of his books that has yet to be translated into English though it has been translated into Catalan, Chinese, Hebrew and Norwegian. This is very different from his usual novels, in that it has few literary references and fewer … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil (A Brief History of Portable Literature). This novel (?) follows a format similar to several of his other works, in that he takes a literary idea – in this case portable literature – and sets off on a bizarre and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lesia Daria‘s Forty One. This is a novel by a woman born in the USA, of Ukrainian parents but currently living in the UK. Her heroine, Eva Holden, is, however, Polish, albeit with Ukrainian grandparents and living in the UK. Eva is an intelligent and educated woman but … Read more