The latest addition to my website is Eugene Vodolazkin‘s Оправдание Острова (A History of the Island). This is the history of an imaginary island, told both in a series of sometimes contradictory chronicles as well as with commentary by the 347 (sic) year old former royal couple. The story takes us from the early days … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Shalash‘s شلش العراقيية (Shalash the Iraqi). This is an anonymous blog written in 2005-2006 (i.e. post-Saddam Hussein)which is satirical and, presumably, often fanciful and fictitious, hence the combined blog has been called a novel. Shalash is at times serious but he is mainly witty and satirical, mocking his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Michal Ajvaz‘s Cesta na jih (Journey to the South). This is an amazing work, starting with a ballet of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and where one of the dancers murders an audience member. Martin who saw the murder and who is writing a thesis on Kant, and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lyudmila Petrushevskaya‘s Нас украли. История преступлений (Kidnapped). Petrushevskaya is best-known for her weird/dark tales and though this is a novel it takes the form of several tales within tales within tales… We start with a man, Sergei Sertsov, who made his fortune (illegally) after the fall of his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Pig Tale. This is a very witty book, damning human foibles, told from the point of view of a five year old boar (i.e. male pig) called Ed. Ed manages to escape from the pig farm and we follow his adventures (which are being recounted to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Beka Adamashvili‘s ამ რომანში ყველა კვდება (Everybody Dies in this Novel) . This is a wonderful postmodern romp by a young Georgian writer in which a fictional character called Memento Mori tries to save characters who get killed in literature (starting with Romeo and Juliet) and then teams … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pat Gray‘s Narrator. The narrator is called, yes, Mr (Basil) Narrator. He is in (a fictitious) Morocco working for a British engineering firm and trying to get a project fior a pump-house approved which had been on track but now is not. This seemingly requires getting to the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Month of the Drowned Dog. This is a decidedly postmodern novel, as we might expect from Sharp. Sharp, the author, tells of a character known only as the writer who had written a book which he had abandoned and is now returning to. We get (more … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mia Couto‘s Mulheres de Cinzas (Woman of the Ashes). This is the first book in a trilogy about Portugal’s colonisation of the part of Africa that came to be Mozambique, at the end of the nineteenth century. We follow a village, Nkokolani, inhabited by the Chopi people. They … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Титан (A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles). This is not a novel but, as Lebedev says in his introduction, the stories are based on his and others’ reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union and share a mystical topography in which the legacy of … Read more