tmn The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Alice in Venice. Alice Short is on holiday in Venice to visit the varioius sites where the film Don’t Look Now was filmed. She meets – maybe -a Frenchman called Alain who may be drug dealer, an assassin or an academic specialising in Henry Fielding or … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Robert Irwin‘s The Limits of Vision. Marcia is an English housewife seemingly obsessed with cleanliness. When her vacuum cleaner breaks down, just before her coffee morning guests arrive, she is confronted by Mucor the Fungus, the spokesperson for dirt. Once her guests arrive, admiring the Dutch painting of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Adelle Stripe & Lias Saoudi‘s Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure. This book is a fictional biography and an alternative version of historic events about Fat White Family, a contemporary English rock/punk band. The book is told in the third person (presumably by … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hassouna Mosbahi‘s الطلييتيم الدهر (Solitaire). Yunus is a Tunisian man who has just reached he age of sixty. He feels that his life is coming to an end. He is divorced. His country is, in his view, a mess and totally corrupt and so is the greater Arab … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Eoghan Smith‘s A Provincial Death. Smyth, a researcher studying the Moon is clinging to a rock two-three kilometres off the coast of Ireland. Neither we nor he know why he is here. He gradually recovers his memory and we learn that his boss has predicted that the Moon … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hans von Trotha‘s Pollaks Arm (Pollak’s Arm). Ludwig Pollak was a very respected Jewish Austro-Czech classical archeologist and dealer, who spent much of his adult life in Rome and is best-known for finding the missing arm of the famous sculpture Laocoön and His Sons. This book recounts the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergio Pitol‘s El desfile del amor (Love Parade). Miguel del Solar is a forty year old Mexican living in England but visiting Mexico City. He has just written a history book on 1914/15 in Mexico and now plans to write one on 1942. His research reminds him that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lídia Jorge‘s Vento Assobiando nas Gruas (The Wind Whistling in the Cranes). The Leandro family have owned a canning factory in the Algarve since 1908 with a ten year gap from 1975 when it was given to the workers following the Carnation Revolution. The factory is no longer … Read more
I have now read twenty Norwegian novels in a row. To sum up a national literature, let alone an entire nation on the basis of reading twenty arbitrarily selected novels may seem foolhardy but nothing ventured…. The first point to make about these novels (and other Norwegian novels I have read) is that many of … Read more
Yes, this novel is about borders, particularly national ones but also borders between people. Apart from a very large section involving the Battle of Stalingrad, much of this novel is set around the Luxembourg-Belgum-German border. We start with the Ardennes Offensive (aka the Battle of the Bulge) when a soldier serving in the US army … Read more