The latest addition to my website is Talasbek Asemkulov‘s Талтус (Полдень) (A Life at Noon). Talasbek Asemkulov is a Kazakh dombra player and has helped to revive the tradition, which had almost died, in Kazakhstan. This is an autobiographical novel. We follow the childhood and youth of Azhigerei, our hero, but we also learn of … Read more
I have just returned from a cruise down the Danube, into the Black Sea and up the Dnieper. Though this was not the purpose, there was a lot to see of literary interest. Only a small part of the journey was in Romania but we did stop at Constanța. In Roman times, Constanța was known … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Dina Salustio‘s A Louca de Serrano (The Madwoman of Serrano). This is the first novel written by a woman published in Cape Verde and the first in English. It may well be the first magic realist and feminist novel from Cape Verde. It tells the story of the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Soledad Puértolas‘ Queda la noche [The Night Remains]. This book follows the story of Aurora a thirty-something, single Spanish woman who struggles to cope with life. She has a series of desultory affairs but they do not really work out. She travels East with a male friend, particularly … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Margaret Atwood‘s The Testaments. This is her well-publicised follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, and is set some fifteen years after that book ended, still in Gilead, a successor country to the United States. In this book we primarily follow the story of three women. Aunt Lydia is in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Salman Rushdie:‘s Quichotte. This is nominally Rushdie’s pastiche of Don Quixote, with its inspiration more from US TV shows and Pinocchio than from Cervantes. We follow a TV-obsessed Indian immigrant to the US, who wants to win the heart of a former Bollywood, now US TV star and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s El testamento del mago tenor [The Will of the Tenor Magician]. This book, not translated into English, tells the story of a magician who, on his deathbed, leaves a special magic trick to the Eternal Buddha. The Eternal Buddha is a god but also very much … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Tullio Avoledo‘s L’elenco telefonico di Atlantide [The Atlantis Telephone Directory]. The story is about Giulio Avoledo, a lawyer with a regional bank in North-East Italy. He has various problems. The bank is being taken over by a larger bank, Bancalleanza, and he may lose his job. His marriage … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Olga Tokarczuk‘s Bieguni (Flights). The Polish title refers to a sect of Old Believers who believed that they should run away from anti-Christian authorities. However, though this issue briefly comes up later in the book, the novel is essentially a series of chapters of varying lengths, primarily on … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Peter Adolphsen‘s Machine (Machine). This is another short but very inventive novel from Adolphsen. We follow the life of an oil molecule, from its creation some fifty-five million years ago (from the heart of a Eohippus) and how it either directly affects various various people or how things … Read more