The latest addition to my website is Victor Pelevin‘s Омон Ра (Omon Ra). This is a fairly conventional satire on the Soviet space programme. Omon, the hero (named after the acronym for the special police squad – his father is a police officer) dreams of becoming a cosmonaut. He and his friend Mityok, who wants … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Victor Pelevin‘s Жёлтая стрела (The Yellow Arrow). This short novel is a train-as-a-metaphor-for-life novel, by no means the first in Russian literature. This train, called The Yellow Arrow, is a huge train. No-one knows where it comes from and only a few people seem to know that it … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Lamees Naji, the third Sharp novel published this year and the third I have reviewed in the past couple of weeks. This one is different from the other two. While it is certainly experimental, on the surface it seems quite mundane. We follow the life of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Edmundo Paz Soldán‘s El delirio de Turing (Turing’s Delirium), only the second Bolivian novel on my site. This one is set during the 2000 Cochabamba protests against increases in water prices following privatisation, though disguised as the increase in electricity prices following privatisation, in the fictitious town of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jonathan Coe‘s Number 11. This is a sort of an update to Coe’s What a Carve Up! (US: The Winshaw Legacy). The former book attacks Thatcherism and this book attacks the current state of contemporary Britain, though far less savagely and not focussed on the prime minister but … Read more
The Syndicat de la librairie française (the French booksellers’ association) has put out a reading list of books to read following the terrorist atacks in Paris. The list is, of course, in French and nearly all the books are non-fiction, though there is one fiction work I have read: Mathias Enard‘s Boussole [Compass], not yet … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mouloud Mammeri‘s La Colline Oubliée [The Forgotten Hill], one of the many Algerian novels sadly not translated into English. This one is about an Algerian village in the period leading up to World War II and during that war. Mokrane is the main character and we follow his … Read more