The latest addition to my website is Javier Cercas‘ El Impostor [The Impostor]. This is what Cercas describes as a novel without fiction, i.e a novel based on a real life person and/or events. In this case, it is about the very real Enric Marco, a man who had been the charismatic and hard-working head … Read more
The latest addition to my website is V. Y. Mudimbe‘s Entre les eaux (Between Tides), a fairly rare occurrence of a novel from the Democratic Republic of the Congo that has been translated into English. This one is about Pierre Landu, a black African Catholic priest who is struggling with his faith. He is serving … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Tryno Maldonado‘s Teoría de las catástrofes [Catastrophe Theory. This novel is set in Oaxaca, Mexico, during the 2006 protests, arising from a teacher’s strike. Anselmo is a teacher of maths, who has come to Oaxaca and managed to find a few occasional and usually badly paid jobs teaching … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Oskar Maria Graf‘s Das Leben meiner Mutter (The Life of My Mother). This is an excellent autobiographical novel, about, of course, Oskar Maria Graf’s mother, Theres (but always known as Resl) née Heimrath, but it is also about the politics and history of the region (Lake Starnberg, in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Esmail Fassih‘s ثريا در اغما (Sorraya in a Coma). The eponymous heroine of this noel, Sorraya, spends the whole of the book in a coma. It is narrated by her uncle, Jalal Aryan. He is an employee of the Iranian National Oil Company. He had been based in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Augusto Higa Oshiro‘s La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu [The Illumination of Katzuo Nakamatsu]. The hero of the novel, Katzuo Nakamatsu, is a fifty-eight year old Peruvian widower, of Japanese origin. He has feelings of imminent death and a terrible feeling of not belonging. He has always felt different, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Habib Selmi‘s نساء البساتين (Souriez, vous êtes en Tunisie !) [Smile, You Are In Tunisia]. The novel is narrated by Taoufik, a Tunisian who has married a French woman and now lives in France. He has come back to visit Tunisia, which he has not visited for five … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gonçalo M. Tavares‘ Um Homem: Klaus Klump (O Reino (The Kingdom) series) (A Man: Klaus Klump). This is the first in the Kingdom series, though the last to be made available in English. I found it quite disappointing. It is short, written in staccato sentences and often pithy … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wilson Harris‘ Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. This is another hard slog, though Harris takes up many of the both the themes and locations he has taken up in his earlier work. We are in the Guyanese jungle, at the confluence of three rivers, above which sits Sorrow Hill, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gonçalo M. Tavares‘ A Máquina de Joseph Walser (O Reino (The Kingdom) series) (Joseph Walser’s Machine). As the title implies, Joseph Walser has a relationship with machines. He works in a factory, operating one (we do not know what it/he does). His boss, Klober Muller, tells him how … Read more