The latest addition to my website is Svava Jakobsdóttir‘s Leigjandinn (The Lodger). This is a short but superb satire on the US bases in Iceland, which Jakobsdóttir and the left-wing political party to which she belonged and for which she was a member of parliament was bitterly opposed. It tells the tale of a couple, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mourad Bourboune‘s Le Muezzin [The Muezzin] (later: Le Muezzin bègue). Mourad Bourboune was one of the generation who had participated in the Algerian Revolution and who wrote about it but yet, for some reason, his reputation has not been as high as some of his contemporaries. Indeed, this … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hubert Aquin‘s Trou de mémoire (Blackout). This is the story of two men who have a few things in common. Pierre X Magnant and Olympe Ghezzo-Quénum are both political revolutionaries, both pharmacists and are both having an affair with a (different) English woman, who happen to be sisters, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Luigi Malerba‘s Il fuoco Greco [Greek Fire]. This is somewhat different from Malerba’s usual somewhat zany distorted reality and unreliable narrator. It is a historical novel set in Constantinople at the end of the tenth century, under the Byzantines. As the title says, it involves Greek fire, something … Read more
Doris Lessing, the Persian-born novelist, brought up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) died this morning. She is best-known for her novel The Golden Notebook but wrote many first-class novels during her long career. We had listened to her on an old Desert Island Discs just a couple of weeks ago (you can download/listen to it … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jeremías Gamboa‘s Contarlo todo [Tell It All]. Though a first novel, this work has had considerable pre-publication promotion in the Spanish-speaking world. It has been hailed as part of the new boom and garnered many favourable pre-publication reviews. It is very much an autobiographical work, telling, in considerable … Read more
Luis Goytisolo has won the Spanish Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas [National Prize for Spanish Letters]. I found his Antagonía tetralogy challenging but well worth reading. Sadly, it is not available in English. Indeed, none of his work is available in English. His brother Juan won the prize in 2008. The only other writer … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Chinghiz Aitmatov‘s И дольше века длится день (The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years). Interestingly enough I have two novels from Kyrgyzstan on my website and both have science fiction elements. This one mainly tells the story of Burannyi Yedigei, a man who had suffered from shell … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Terézia Mora‘s Das Ungeheuer [The Monster], winner of this year’s German Book Prize. It follows on from Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent [The Only Man on the Continent], which told the story of the somewhat naive and simple computer engineer, Darius Kopp, from the former East Germany, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pierre Lemaitre‘s Au revoir là-haut (The Great Swindle), the winner of the 2013 Goncourt Prize. The story starts in the last week of World War I, when all parties are awaiting the armistice. However, Lieutenant d’Aulnay-Pradelle wants his last chance at glory and promotion. He sends two men … Read more