The latest addition to my website is Nicole Krauss‘ The History of Love. This is an excellent book about creativity and authorship, about the Holocaust and about who we are. Leo Gursky was in love with Alma back in Slonim (variously in Poland and Russia). Her father paid for her to go to the USA … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Giono‘s Que ma joie demeure (Joy of Man’s Desiring). This is an unusual book for Giono, as it flirts with fantasy. It is set, as usual, in a farming community in an unnamed region of central France. The region has been affected by a general malaise, making … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Igor Eliseev‘s One-Two. This novel tells the story of two conjoined girls and their life as children in a brutal Soviet institution and then their life in post-Soviet Russia where the capitalist system turns out to be just as cruel as the Soviet system, as they are hired … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Claudio Magris‘ Un altro mare (A Different Sea). This novel tells the story of the very real Enrico Mreule. He is friends with two other young men, including the philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter, in Gorizia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The three friends spend their time discussing philosophy … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Dumitru Tsepeneag‘s Hotel Europa (Hotel Europa). This is a hilarious, anarchic novel about an unnamed Romanian narrator (clearly based on Tsepeneag himself) who is living in France, married to a French woman, and who is trying to write a novel but is not sure what he wants the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Minae Mizumura‘s 母の遺産 (Inheritance of Mother). This is a feminist novel, about the changing role of women in Japan. We follow three generations of Japanese women, who all have their own problems, caused or exacerbated by their sex. We mainly follow Mitsuki and her older sister Natsuki who … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Stafford‘s The Mountain Lion, a semi-autobiographical novel with the two main characters, brother and sister Roger and Molly Fawcett, being based on Stafford and her brother Dick, who were very close, as are Ralph and Molly. The Fawcetts live in California. Mr. Fawcett is dead but his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Julien Gracq‘s Un balcon en forêt (A Balcony in the Forest). This novel was based on Gracq’s own experiences in World War II and tells of Grange, a young lieutenant, put in charge of a bunker by the River Meuse, near the Belgian border, to stop advancing German … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Mac y su contratiempo [Mac and His Problem]. Mac is a bankrupt builder who plans to rewrite the (very poor) novel, in the form of interrelated stories, written thirty years ago by a Barcelona neighbour, now a moderately famous writer This novel is narrated by a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Joyce Cary‘s To Be a Pilgrim. This is the second in the trilogy, which started with Herself Surprised. This one tells the story of Tom Wilcher, last of his generation of Wilchers, an old man with heart problems. It is set just before World War II, as he … Read more