The latest addition to my website is Eduardo Mendoza‘s La ciudad de los prodigios (The City of Marvels). This is something of an epic novel, following both the story of the city of Barcelona from the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition to the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition as well as following the story of Onofre Bouvila. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ian McEwan‘s The Cockroach, a satire on Brexit. He uses two clever twists in the book. The first is from Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). We start off with the eponymous cockroach who metamorphosises into the prime minister, a thinly disguised Boris Johnson, though, at the time of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick Modiano‘s Rue des Boutiques obscures (Missing Person). It tells the story of Guy Roland, a man living in the 1960s who has no idea who he is. He has been working as the assistant for a private detective who has now retired. As a result, Roland concentrates … Read more
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