The latest addition to my website is Thuận‘s Chinatown : tiẻ̂u thuyé̂t (Chinatown). Our unnamed heroine spends the entire book on a Paris metro train which is held up by the investigation of a suspicious duffle bag, with her twelve-year old son asleep on her shoulder. She spends the time ruminating on her life. She … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Patrick Modiano‘s La Danseuse [The Dancer]. Modiano’s latest follows the basic plot line of many of his earlier novels. A young man, presumably Modiano’s alter ego, has arrived in Paris and is struggling to make a living. He associates with a group of people, some of whom have … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Nino Haratischwili‘s Juja (Juja). We follow the stories of several people, mainly women, who seemed ti be connected to Jeanne Saré. Saré, whose story we also follow, lived a lonely life, writing her depressing thoughts in an exercise book, before throwing herself in front of a train. The … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Boris Poplavsky‘s Домой с небес (Homeward from Heaven). This is a follow-up to his earlier Аполлон Безобразов (Apollon Bezobrazov) and, indeed, features the devilish character Apollon Bezobrazov, who appears to assist our hero, Oleg, when things are not going well. Oleg is a Russian exile living in Paris … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yuri Felsen‘s Обман (Deceit). This novel was first published in 1930 and is one of three surviving novels by Felsen, others being lost after he was sent to Auschwitz and murdered, and the first to appear in English. It is written in the form of a diary by … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Dumitru Tsepeneag‘s Pigeon vole (Pigeon Post) . This is a witty and clever post-modernist novel, written in French and set in Paris. An unnamed author, who may not be the author who is, in fact, another character created by the narrator and who plays chess is trying to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sándor Márai‘s A sziget [The Island]. This novel, available in seven other languages but not English, tells the story of Viktor Henrik Askenazi, a Frenchman of Hungarian origin, who is a professor of Greek and Asia Minor languages in Paris, married to Anna, with a daughter and also … Read more