tmn The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Doctor Pasavento. This is typical Vila-Matas, a wonderfully inventive story, full of digressions literary learning, speculations, complications and stories. It is narrated by an unnamed narrator but a man who assumes various identities, including that of Dr (and dottore, i.e. the Italian for doctor) Pasavento, Dr … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alisa Ganieva‘s Праздничная гора (The Mountain and the Wall), a novel from Dagestan. Dagestan is a republic which is still part of Russia and next door to Chechnya. The Chechen war has spilled over into Dagestan. As an Islamic republic, like Chechnya, there is a rise in Islamisation, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz‘s La Grande Peur dans la montagne (Terror on the Mountain). This is a first-class 1920s Swiss novel, which has been translated into English though is sadly long since out of print in English. It tells the story of a small Alpine community. There is some wonderful … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Herta Müller‘s Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (The Passport). This short novel tells the story of a small German community left in Romania after World War II. The main character is Windisch, the miller. He is eager to get a passport to emigrate to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Herta Müller‘s Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (The Appointment). This is a grim tale of life in Communist Romania. The narrator is on her second marriage, married to Paul, an alcoholic, who works in an engineering factory. She works in a clothing factory, a job she … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gerald Murnane‘s A Lifetime on Clouds. This book, Murnane’s second novel, is, quite simply, about the masturbatory fantasies of an Australian teenager living in the poorer part of Melbourne in the 1950s. Adrian Sherd lives with his parents and two younger brothers. About four times a week, he … Read more
Kamila Shamsie has written what she calls a provocative article, about gender bias in publishing. I have dealt with this issue before – here, here and here. It has also, of course, been discussed in many other places. I do not know what prompted Shamsie to write her article now but it may well have … Read more
I spent last week in Budapest but was somewhat disappointed with the literary offerings. I asked around and found only only literary house/museum – the Petőfi Literary Museum, devoted to the poet Sándor Petőfi. Sándor Petőfi lived in the early nineteenth century, became a famous poet (actually making his living from poetry) and has since … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gerald Murnane‘s Barley Patch. This is a superb work from one of Australia’s foremost novelists about the art of fiction. The anonymous narrator insists that it is a work of fiction but much of the book is about writing fiction and, in particular, about how images affect both … Read more
The latest addition to my website is James Barke‘s Major Operation. Barke is a Scottish novelist who has sadly disappeared from view, though Canongate did reissue his Land of the Leal. This novel is set in Depression-era Glasgow and is overtly left-wing. We follow the tale of some ship workers who lose their jobs when … Read more