The latest addition to my website is Marco Mancassola‘s La vita erotica dei superuomini (Erotic Lives of the Superheroes). Don’t be put off, as I nearly was, by the title. This is not a silly, pastiche of superheroes. It is a serious book, where the main characters just happen to be superheroes. We follow the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Stefan Andres‘ Wir sind Utopia (UK: We Are Utopia; US: We are God’s Utopia). This is a short novel but a very fine one and Andres’ best-known novel. It was published illegally in Germany in 1942, while Andres and his wife were living in Italy. It takes place … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Frédéric Werst‘s Ward: Ier-IIe siècle [Ward: 1st-2nd century]. This is a stunningly original work, which purports to be an anthology, with extensive notes, of the literature of the Wards, an entirely imagined people, who write in Wardwesân, an entirely imagined language. Indeed, Werst wrote the texts in Wardwesân … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marina Warner‘s The Lost Father. Warner is best known as a cultural critic, writing primarily about myth, fairy tales and art. She has recently, for example, criticised Richard Dawkins for dismissing the power of fairy tales. However, she is also a fine novelist. This novel is told by … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rita Rahman‘s Liefdesgeuren (Love’s Perfumes), the first Aruban novel on my website. Myrna is from an unnamed former Dutch Caribbean colony and is a professional environmentalist, attending the World Food Summit in the Hague. There she meets Arno, a junior minister in the Dutch government, who has problems … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Quinx or The Ripper’s Tale, the last book in his his Avignon Quintet. We might have hoped for a great summing-up but what we, in fact, get is a somewhat feeble attempt to tie up loose ends – what happened to Livia and the Templar treasure … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jacques Roubaud‘s L’Enlèvement d’Hortense (Hortense is Abducted). One of the minor pleasures in reading novels is finding commonalities between different novels. The last two novels I have read are both by French authors but they are very different novels, yet both feature a main character called Hortense (a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Katherine Pancol‘s Les Yeux jaunes des crocodiles (The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles). I have been hesitating about reading this book but, on my recent holiday in France, it seemed somehow appropriate, not least because Pancol’s latest book, Muchachas 3 was in every book shop I visited and, though … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Tim Winton‘s Eyrie. While not his best, this is another fine novel from Winton. Tom Keely was a successful advocate for WildForce, an Australian environmental group that took on and beat businesses flouting environmental laws. But it all went sour, as did his marriage. He is now living … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jun’ichiro Tanizaki‘s お艶殺し (A Spring-Time Case). This is the earliest of Tanizaki’s works to be translated into English, though the English text is very difficult to get hold of, having first been published in 1927 in Japan and never reprinted. This fairly short novel tells the story of … Read more