The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Bartleby y compañía (Bartleby & Co.). This is perhaps more literary criticism than a novel. It is narrated by a man called Marcelo who wrote a novel twenty-five years ago and has not written anything since. His new work is to be about writers he calls … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lucia Etxebarría‘s Un milagro en equilibrio [A Miracle in the Balance]. This tells the story of Eva Agulló, a Spanish woman who, early in the novel, has given birth to a baby, Amanda, and recounts her life to that date. When young she had done lots of sex, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ París no se acaba nunca (Never Any End to Paris). This is a fun post-modern novel, nominally about the two years the unnamed author, but clearly Vila-Matas himself, spent in Paris writing his first novel. It is told in the form of a three day lecture … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ La asesina ilustrada [The Illustrated Murderess]. This is a strange story about a story, called La asesina ilustrada, which seems to have the effect that those who read it, die. The key person is Elena Villena. It is she who wrote the story, she who is … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Javier Cercas‘ El Impostor [The Impostor]. This is what Cercas describes as a novel without fiction, i.e a novel based on a real life person and/or events. In this case, it is about the very real Enric Marco, a man who had been the charismatic and hard-working head … Read more
The latest addition to my website is José Carlos Llop‘s El mensajero de Argel [The Messenger from Algiers]. This novel, written by a writer known in Spain as much for his poetry as for his prose fiction, is something of a schizophrenic novel. It starts off by being about memory, loss of memory and recovered … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Una casa para siempre [A House Forever], a very inventive post-modern Spanish novel. The Great Greppi is a ventriloquist – he will go on to be very successful – and he tells his story, not in a continuous narration but with a series of vignettes of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Elena Quiroga‘s Presente profundo [Profound Present]. This is a very intelligent novel on death, time and life. Rubén is a doctor and comes across two Galician women who both kill themselves. Neither are in any way connected, apart from their sex and nationality. Indeed, while he knew one … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Carmen Amoraga‘s La vida era eso [Such Was Life]. This is another book in my reading of this year’s literary prize winners/shortlisted books. This book won Spain’s Nadal Prize. It tells the story of Giuliana di Benedetto, an Argentinian of Italian origin who lives in Spain. At the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lucia Etxebarría‘s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes [Beatrice and the Heavenly Bodies]. This is the story of a young Spanish woman, Beatriz de la Haya, and her life at around the age of twenty. For a while she lives with Mónica, in the house of Mónica’s parents, who … Read more