English PEN’s PEn Presents Initiative has had the excellent idea of presenting a list of six books, which are all very worthy but have not been translated into English (yet). The six are Ilva Fabiani, an Italian novelist, Kristien Dieltiens, a Belgian young adult novelist, Antonio Orejudo, a Spanish novelist, Ulrike Almut Sandig, a German … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Erhard von Büren‘s Abdankung. Ein Bericht (Epitaph for a Working Man). Von Büren wrote this, his first novel, when he was nearly fifty. It is the affectionate portrait of an ordinary, hard-working Swiss stonemason, in the last year of his life. Alois Haller has worked all his life. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mirza Waheed‘s The Collaborator. This is the first novel on my site from Kashmir. This novel is set in the India-Kashmir conflict and tells the story of a teenage boy who, unlike the other boys in the village, does not go off and join the freedom fighters but … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jenny Erpenbeck‘s Aller Tage Abend (The End of Days). This is a non-whimsical variation on a technique we have seen in Kate Atkinson‘s Life After Life. In this case, the heroine, who is only named at the end and then only with her married name, Frau Hoffmann, dies … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thea Astley‘s A Kindness Cup. Astley deals directly with violence in this novel. The story tells of a group of white vigilantes in the early part of the last century who set out to teach a band of aborigines a lesson (nominally for stealing a baby, which they … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thea Astley‘s The Acolyte. This novel is now out of print in the UK and US, which is a shame, as it is an excellent novel about both an artist who is thoroughly self-centred and a man who has no sense of purpose and worth, who becomes the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Marie Redonnet‘s La femme au Colt 45 [The Woman with the Colt 45]. Redonnet seemed to have stopped publishing but she has now appeared with a new novel and a new publisher. This novel is even grimmer than some of her previous works. It is set in two … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jorge Ibargüengoitia‘s Dos crímenes (Two Crimes). This is another mocking satire of Mexican mores by Ibargüengoitia, this time somewhat subverting the conventional detective story and taking as its premise that, perhaps inevitably, that the dividing line between the police and the criminals is thin to non-existent. Marcos González … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rafael Chirbes‘ Paris-Austerlitz. Chirbes had started this book in 1996, put it aside and then returned to it later, only finishing it last year, shortly before he died. It is a semi-autobiographical account of a homosexual relationship between a young bourgeois Spanish painter and a much older working-class … Read more
This blog and the associated website are called Modern Novel for a very good and obvious reason: they are about the modern novel. Nearly all reviews are reviews of literary novels. However, every so often a short story or non-fiction work creeps in. This non-fiction work – The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction … Read more