The latest addition to my website is Rodrigo Hasbún‘s Los afectos (Affections), a first-class novel, based on the story of a real German family that emigrated to Bolivia. The family is the Ertl family: father, a former cameraman of Leni Riefenstahl, mother, a chain smoker who will die of cancer, and three daughters, one of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Max Aub‘s Campo abierto [Open Field], the second book in Max Aub’s Magic Labyrinth series about the Spanish Civil War, though the third to be published. This one is set in Valencia in the first part (where Aub grew up) and Madrid in the second part, leading up … Read more
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has just posted Latitude Festival’s Top 20 Books by Women. What a disappointing selection! Only one originally written in a language other than English (Allende), only three others by non-UK, non-US writers (Roy, Atwood and Ngozi Adichie) and, FFS, Girl on a Train. May I politely remind them of María … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hendrik Groen‘s Pogingen om iets van het leven te maken. Het geheime dagboek van Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 jaar (Attempts to Make Something of Life. The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 1/4 Years Old). This is a hilariously funny diary by an elderly Dutch man in a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rosario Ferré‘s La casa de la laguna (The House on the Lagoon). Ferré, whose father was a governor of Puerto Rico, writes about a house and family on Puerto Rico, from the arrival of the Buenaventura Mendizabal from Spain at the beginning of the last century to the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gérard Bessette‘s L’incubation (Incubation). The novel is entirely narrated in stream-of-consciousness style by a man known as Lagarde, a librarian by profession. He is primarily telling the story Gordon Blackwell, his friend and an English teacher at the university in the small Canadian town of Narcotown. Gordon had … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Claire-Louise Bennett‘s Pond. This book is subtitled Stories but it is really a novel, as it tells the tale of the unnamed narrator and her three years living in a (fairly) remote cottage in rural Ireland. We learn that she likes nature but not in a too romantic … Read more
Peruvian novelist Miguel Gutiérrez died yesterday, shortly before his seventy-sixth birthday. I can find no reports in English but it has been in announced in Spanish here and here. He is best-known for his novel about incest El mundo sin Xóchitl [The World Without Xochitl], which I thought was an excellent novel. Neither this novel … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Erhard von Büren‘s Wespenzeit (Wasp Days). This is the second novel I have read by this Swiss author and I must say that I enjoyed it more than his first one. Like that novel, this is the story of an ordinary man, in this case a municipal librarian … Read more
The latest addition to my website is John Williams‘ Augustus. This is a novel of the life of Caesar Augustus, formerly Octavian or Gaius Octavius. We follow his life from when he is a young man, unsure of himself, even though Julius Caesar has adopted him as his son, till his death. Williams tells the … Read more