The latest addition to my website is Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz‘s Farinet ou la fausse monnaie [Farinet or the Forged Money]. Maurice Farinet, when young, befriended an old man, Sage, who had found a vein of gold in the mountains. When he died, it became Farinet’s. He uses the gold to make twenty franc coins. Given that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mathias Enard‘s Boussole (Compass). This is about one man, an Austrian musicologist called Franz Ritter, who is currently ill with an unspecified disease, who throws away the tablets his doctor gives him and lies awake at night, thinking about various things. These include his unrequited love for the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rabah Belamri‘s Le Soleil sous le tamis [The Sun Under the Screen]. This is an autobiographical novel of the author’s childhood in an Algerian village during the 1950s. Belamri is such an accomplished writer that what could have been a pedestrian account works very well. He divides his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alexandra Kleeman‘s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. I was just yesterday reading a story about eating fads. While this novel is concerned with eating and eating habits, it only tangentially deals with eating disorders. What it is primarily about is how the media focuses on … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Amélie Nothomb‘s Le crime du comte Neville [The Crime of Count Neville]. This is her twenty-fourth book in twenty-four years. She regularly produces a novel during the French rentrée and this one is this year’s offering. It will doubtlessly appear in English ere long. It is something of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jonathan Franzen‘s Purity. Inevitably, this book has caused much controversy and has been condemned for being sexist (which it partially is but no more than thousands of other novels), problematic, self-indulgent and probably all sorts of other crimes. Ignore the buzz and read the book. It is not … Read more
‘Tis the season for la rentrée, which, in France, refers both to going back to school at the beginning of the new school year but, more importantly, for us, the host of new books that are published around now, in time both for the prize-giving season and, presumably, the Christmas market. This is not unique … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Elena Ferrante‘s Storia del nuovo cognome (The Story of a New Name), the second in her L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend) series. This novel starts exactly where the last one ended, at the marriage between Stefano and Lila, with Lila incandescent with rage at seeing the shoes she … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Elena Ferrante‘s L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend). This novel has had considerable success, both in English and Italian and, with the fourth in the L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend) series) coming out in English next month, I felt that it was time I read it. The first reason … Read more
I am a glutton for a good list but I like my lists complete. In The Observer, Robert McCrum has been giving us one a week, which is a really unsatisfactory way of doing it. When you limit yourself to 100 (or any other arbitrary figure) you have to play juggling games, putting this one … Read more