The latest addition to my website is Clarice Lispector‘s O lustre (The Chandelier). This is Lispector’s second novel, written when she was in her early twenties, and now published in English more than seventy years after publication in Portuguese. Much of the novel takes place in the head of Virginia, whom we first meet as … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miklós Szentkuthy‘s Fekete Reneszánsz (Black Renaissance). This is the second in his St Orpheus Breviary series. It has not yet been translated into English (I read it in French) but will be appearing from Contra Mundum Press in the not too distant future. Nominally about Claudio Monteverdi, his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès‘ L’Île du Point Némo (Island of Point Nemo). Like his earlier work, this is a madcap romp, with adventures, sex and violence, world travel and characters from all over the world. It features amputated feet, a racing pigeon fancying, breast-loving Chinese manufacturer of e-readers, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gloria Guardia‘s Tiniebla blanca [White Darkness]. The unnamed narrator, like Guardia, is a Panamanian student at Vassar College. One evening, while in New York, she has forgotten her money and tracks down an uncle and aunt, Antonio and Carmen. They are very friendly but she soon discovers that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hamid Ismailov‘s Jinlar Bazmi (The Devil’s Dance). It tells the story of the last nine months of the life of Uzbek writer Abdulla Qodiriy, spent in a Stalinist prison in 1937-38, prior to his execution as a bourgeois nationalist. Just prior to his arrest, Qodiriy had planned to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Rana Haddad:‘s The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor. This is the first novel by a Syrian woman who has spent her adult live in England. This novel tells the story of a Syrian woman, daughter of an English woman and a Syrian heart surgeon, Dunya Noor who, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ricardo Piglia‘s Plata quemada (Money to Burn. This is a novelised account of an actual robbery from a bank armoured car in Buenos Aires. Piglia was a journalist at the time and reported on the case. The robbery succeeds but the police track down the robbers, with others … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Paolo Cognetti‘s Le otto montagne (The Eight Mountains), which won the prestigious Strega Prize in Italy. It tells the story of Pietro, only child of two mountain lovers. His father, in particular, is very keen on climbing at high altitudes in the Italian Alps and Pietro gets the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is J. G. Farrell‘s Troubles. This novel, which won the Lost Man Booker Prize more than thirty years after the author’s death, is the first in Farrell’s acclaimed Empire Trilogy. It is set in the crumbling Majestic Hotel, a symbol of the decaying British Empire, located in County Wexford … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Chico Buarque‘s Leite Derramado (Spilt Milk). The book is narrated by a hundred-year old Brazilian man, who is lying in a hospital bed in Rio de Janeiro, in a public hospital. He comes from a rich family but the family has fallen on hard times, partially through poor … Read more