The latest addition to my website is Wilson Harris‘ The Guyana Quartet. This consists of four relatively short novels, all set in the Guyana jungle, and it is generally considered Harris’ masterpiece. The first novel, Palace of the Peacock, is, in my view the best and tells of the journey of a motley crew of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Lihn‘s El arte de la palabra [The Way of Speaking]. Lihn was primarily a poet but he wrote five novels of which this is the best known. It concerns a literary conference on the fictional island of Miranda, which has been described as a cross between Chile … Read more
We spent the past week in the North of England, partially for family reasons but we also made a few literary jaunts. I have always wanted to visit Newstead Abbey so we stopped off there on the way up. Newstead Abbey was never an abbey but a priory. Following the dissolution of the monasteries under … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jun’ichiro Tanizaki‘s The Makioka Sisters, one of the great Japanese novels. I have now read this novel three times and seen the film and it continues to give me great pleasure. It tells the story of four sisters, daughters of an old family, whose father had had considerable … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jacques Roumain‘s Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew). While not the first Haitian novel on my website, it is the first written in French. Moreover, it is a considered a classic of Caribbean literature. It tells the story of Manuel, a Haitian man who has been … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ciro Alegría‘s El mundo es ancho y ajeno (Broad and Alien Is the World), a classic Peruvian novel of the 1940s. Alegría was a fighter for the rights of the native population of Peru. This novel is about the brutal exploitation of the natives by the rich and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Francesco Piccolo‘s Il desiderio di essere come tutti. This is a very political novel, telling the story of a man who is now fifty, born in Caserta, who joined the Italian Communist Party, as a result of Jürgen Sparwasser, scoring the winning goal for East Germany against West … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Feri Lainšček‘s Namesto koga roža cveti (Instead Of Whom Does The Flower Bloom). Lainšček grew up in north-eastern Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) near Roma villages and got to know the Roma people. These book is about a Roma family and their neighbours. Halgato (it is a type of gypsy … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Zurab Karumidze‘s დაგნი ანუ სიყვარულის დღესასწაული (Dagny or a Love Feast). Dagny is Dagny Juel, a Norwegian writer, model for Munch and lover of Strindberg, who, in 1901, travelled to Tbilisi, Georgia, where, after three weeks, she was murdered by her Polish lover, Władysław Emeryk. The novel is … Read more
This year’s Man Booker Prize longlist was announced today. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris (Viking) The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus) We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent’s Tail) The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre) J, Howard Jacobson (Jonathan Cape) The Wake, … Read more