The latest addition to my website is Yao-Chang Chen‘s 傀儡花 (Puppet Flower). The novel is primarily set in Taiwan in 1867 when Taiwan is partially controlled by the the Qing Dynasty and partially by the indigenous tribes. Various foreign powers – Netherlands, Portugal, Britain and the US have been involved, though the US less so … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Cheon Myeong-Kwan‘s 고래 (Whale). This is an incredibly complicated and, at times, improbable story about various characters during the second part of the 20th century. Geumbok escapes her brutal father, with the aid of an itinerant fishmonger who, thanks to Geumbok’s entrepreneurial skills, becomes rich but loses her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Clemens Meyer‘s Als wir träumten (While We Were Dreaming). This was the first of his novels published in German but the second to be published in English. It follows the lives of a group of boys/young men in the deprived areas of Leipzig, starting shortly before the fall … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Belén Gopegui‘s Quédate este día y esta noche conmigo ( Stay This Day And Night With Me). This is a novel about Google. We start with a Google intern receiving a non-standard job application. It is 50, 000 words, on paper, not submitted digitally and submitted by two … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maki Kashimada‘s 六〇〇〇度の愛 (Love at Six Thousand Degrees). This is something of a Japanese response to the film Hiroshima mon amour, scripted by Marguerite Duras, about a French woman who has an affair in Hiroshima with a Japanese man whose relatives were killed by the atom bomb. In … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky‘s Странствующее Странно (Stravaging Strange). Stravage is an old Irisih/Scottish word meaning wandering aimlessly. This book consists of three stories (plus a few extras) written in the 1920s but not published in Russian till the 1990s. The first story, the title one, tells of a man who … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miquel de Palol‘s El jardí dels set crepuscles (The Garden of Seven Twilights). This is the first novel by the major Catalan writer to appear in English and it was well worth the wait. It is set in the near future, when nuclear war is taking place globally. … Read more
Having just read twenty Ukrainian novels in a row does not really entitle me to make any major judgements about the country or its literature. Nevertheless I shall make a few remarks on my reading. Ukraine has been in the unfortunate position of having been occupied, in whole or part, by numerous nationalities, particularly the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eugenia Kononenko‘s Російський сюжет (A Russian Story). This is the last in my Ukrainian marathon and, despite the title, certainly one that deals best with the issue of Ukrainianness (the word is used in the book). We follow the story of Eugene (Zhenia) Samarsky. He is named Eugene … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alexei Nikitin‘s Истеми (Y.T). In 1984 five students play a war game which involve inventing countries and transposing real historical characters to other eras and places. It is seemingly harmless but the KGB somehow finds out and they are arrested. They are held for two months but are … Read more