The latest addition to my website is Rafał Wojasiński‘s Tefil (Tefil). A young man looking for information about his long deceased mother goes to a small Polish village, where he meets Tefil, who may have known her. However this book is, as the title states, about Tefil. He is old, permanently broke but more than … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Andrey Kurkov‘s Сердце не мясо (Stolen Heart). The novel is set in Kyiv in the early 1920s and follows the story of a young police investigator, Samson Kolechko. He and his colleague, a former priest, are given the task of investigating the private selling of meat, which neither … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ghazaleh Alizadeh‘s خانه ادریسیها (The House of The Edrisis (Volume 2), following on from first volume. It continues the story of the three remaining members of the Edrisi, whose house has been taken over by revolutionaries. However the Edrisis and the revolutionaries have reached a way of living … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Felix Nesi‘s Orang orang Oetimu (People from Oetimu). Oetimu is a village in West Timor, part of Indonesia. The background is the volatile history – Dutch/Portuguese, Japanese occupation and Indonesia vs East Timor whihch has seemingly settled down but, in practice has not. We follow a host of … Read more
Last year, when I focussed on Palestinians literature, I commented how grim it was because all the books were about the oppression suffered by the Palestinians, primarily from the Israelis but also from the Ottomans and British. The twentieth century was not too good for the Greeks though not as bad as it was for … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Apostolos Doxiadis‘ Ο Θείος Πέτρος και η Εικασία του Γκόλντμπαχ (Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture). The narrator has an uncle Petros who leads a solitary life and is despised by his two younger brothers for being a failure. The narrator does some sleuthing and finds out that Uncle … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Thanassis Valtinos‘ Στοιχεία για τη δεκαετία του ’60 (Data from the Decade of the Sixties). As the title of this book, tells us, though it calls itself a novel, is not really a novel but a mish-mash of information about what was going on in Greece during he … Read more
The latest addition to my website isChristos Chrissopoulos‘ Ο βομβιστης του Παρθενώνα ( The Parthenon Bomber). As the title tells us this is about a man who blows up the Parthenon. We follow various aspects of the story, starting with his account, though we are warned that there are vagarious alleged accounts and it is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Christos Papadimitriou‘s Turing : A Novel about Computation. Ethel, a computer scientist who has developed a relevance search engine, is on holiday in Greece, looking for a Greek god. She meets Alexandros, a twice-divorced archaeologist much older than her. They start an affair. She gets pregnant but heads … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maro Douka‘s Η αρχαία σκουριά (Fool’s Gold). The heroine/narrator of this novel, set in Athens between 1967 and 1974, is Myrsini, the only child of bourgeois parents. She considers herself to be centrist. However early on the Greek colonels take over. She gets involved in the opposition but … Read more