The latest addition to my website is Hector Camín‘s El error de la luna [The Moon’s Mistake]. This tells the story of the nineteen year old Leonor Gonzalbo, whose parents have been killed in a car crash and who is now living with her grandparents. Leonor becomes obsessed with her late aunt, Mariana, whom she … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Valeria Luiselli‘s La historia de mis dientes (The Story of My Teeth). This is a superb post-modern novel about, well, teeth (amongst other things). Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez was born with four premature teeth. When his adult teeth grew, they were all pointing in different directions. After an uneventful … Read more
The latest addition to my website is José Agustín‘s De perfil [In Profile]. This novel, Agustín’s second, had considerable commercial and critical success in Mexico. It tells of four days in the life of the narrator, known only as X, a seventeen year old boy. We follow his relationship with his parents, particularly his father, … Read more
Every year at around this time, I focus on the literature of one particular country. Last year, it was Japan. 2015 it was Russia. 2014 it was Iceland. This year, as you can see from the title, it is Mexico. Three years ago, I wrote a blog post on contemporary Mexican literature. I intended to … Read more
I have just returned from the one continent that has no native born writers (though it does have a few native born people). It also has one bookshop, as the Port Lockroy bookshop in the British Post Office sells a few books. I am, of course referring to Antarctica. However, en route we stopped in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alek Popov‘s Мисия Лондон (Mission to London). Alek Popov was the cultural attaché to the Bulgarian Embassy in London and this is a very funny novel, satirising the Embassy and its relations with the British. The main focus of the story is a charity event, hosted by the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean Giono:‘s Un de Baumugnes (Lovers are Never Losers). This is the second in Giono’s Pan trilogy of novels. This one is a love story. Amédeé, an older itinerant farm worker meets Albin, a young man from the eponymous Baumugnes, a strange (and fictitious) community of non-Catholics driven … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alfredo Bryce Echenique‘s Las obras infames de Pancho Marambio [The Infamous Works of Pancho Marambio]. Bienvenido Salvador Buenaventura is a fifty-four year old successful lawyer in Lima. He has never been married. His parents and two brother are both dead, the men from alcoholism. The two others were … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jaroslav Kalfar‘s Spacemen of Bohemia. Kalfar was born in Prague but moved to the US when he was fifteen and wrote this novel in English. It is about Jakub Procházka, the first Czech astronaut (in 2018), who is sent into space to investigate a mysterious purple cloud between … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Robert Coover‘s Huck Out West. This is another wonderfully post-modern, iconoclastic, very funny book from Robert Coover. It tells the story of Huckleberry Finn and, to a certain degree, of Tom Sawyer, when they become adults and head out to the Wild West. Finn remains the loveable but … Read more