The latest addition to my website is Hans Scherfig‘s Den forsvundne fuldmægtig (The Missing Bureaucrat). This novel takes the form of a detective story, when two men in Copenhagen are found missing within a short while of one another. The first is a respected civil servant, working in the War Department, Teodor Amsted, a man … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness, the first in Durrell’s Avignon Quintet. It starts with the apparent suicide of Piers de Nogaret, descendant of Guillaume de Nogaret, the man who, in 1307, arrested many of the Templars. Piers’ friend and brother-in-law, Bruce Drexel, a doctor in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jun’ichiro Tanizaki‘s 猫と庄造と二人の女 (A Cat, A Man and Two Women). I read some Tanizaki many years ago so now is the time to reread those ones I read before and read those, like this one, I had not read before. This is certainly not one of his greatest … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marie Darrieussecq‘s Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes [You Should Love Men a Lot]. This book has not yet been translated into English but almost certainly will be. It tells the story of Solange, whom we met in her previous book Clèves (All the Way). She is now … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marie Darrieussecq‘s Tom est mort (Tom is Dead). This is (fictitious) tale of a woman whose four-and-a-half year old son dies in an accident – we are not given the details till the end of the book – and what happens to her afterwards. She is writing ten … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Antonio Muñoz Molina‘s La noche de los tiempos (UK: The Depths of Time; US: In the Night of Time), a very long book telling the story of a successful architect from a relatively poor background during the period leading up to the Spanish Civil War and the period … Read more
The latest addition to my website is valter hugo mãe‘s o apocalipse dos trabalhadores [The Apocalypse of the Workers]. mãe spells his name and writes all of his books in lower case, an annoying quirk. This novel tells the story of Maria da Graça, a cleaning lady for a rich man, Mr. Ferreira, who dreams … Read more
The latest addition to my website is valter hugo mãe‘s a máquina de fazer espanhóis [The Machine for Making Spaniards]. Note that he spells his name and writes his books entirely in lowercase. Apart from that annoying quirk, this really is an excellent novel. It tells the story of Antonio Silva, an eighty-four year old … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Upamanyu Chatterjee‘s The Mammaries of the Welfare State. This is a follow-up to Chatterjee’s English, August and continues the story of Agastya Sen, an Indian civil servant. I say that it continues his story, which it does, but the book is essentially a long, vicious, occasionally witty satire … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Josef Škvorecký‘s Nevysvetlitelný príbeh aneb Vyprávení Questa Firma Sicula (An Inexplicable Story or the Narrative of Questus Firmus Siculus). This is a tongue-in-cheek Ovid novel, purporting to be a 1st century Roman manuscript, written by a man whose mother may have been Ovid’s lover. The manuscript is inexplicably … Read more