The latest addition to my website is Esmail Fassih‘s ثريا در اغما (Sorraya in a Coma). The eponymous heroine of this noel, Sorraya, spends the whole of the book in a coma. It is narrated by her uncle, Jalal Aryan. He is an employee of the Iranian National Oil Company. He had been based in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Augusto Higa Oshiro‘s La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu [The Illumination of Katzuo Nakamatsu]. The hero of the novel, Katzuo Nakamatsu, is a fifty-eight year old Peruvian widower, of Japanese origin. He has feelings of imminent death and a terrible feeling of not belonging. He has always felt different, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Habib Selmi‘s نساء البساتين (Souriez, vous êtes en Tunisie !) [Smile, You Are In Tunisia]. The novel is narrated by Taoufik, a Tunisian who has married a French woman and now lives in France. He has come back to visit Tunisia, which he has not visited for five … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gonçalo M. Tavares‘ Um Homem: Klaus Klump (O Reino (The Kingdom) series) (A Man: Klaus Klump). This is the first in the Kingdom series, though the last to be made available in English. I found it quite disappointing. It is short, written in staccato sentences and often pithy … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wilson Harris‘ Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. This is another hard slog, though Harris takes up many of the both the themes and locations he has taken up in his earlier work. We are in the Guyanese jungle, at the confluence of three rivers, above which sits Sorrow Hill, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gonçalo M. Tavares‘ A Máquina de Joseph Walser (O Reino (The Kingdom) series) (Joseph Walser’s Machine). As the title implies, Joseph Walser has a relationship with machines. He works in a factory, operating one (we do not know what it/he does). His boss, Klober Muller, tells him how … 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 Irène Némirovsky‘s Les Chiens et les loups (The Dogs and the Wolves). This novel, unlike some of her others, is set, initially, in Kiev, where the Sinner family, a lower-middle class family, reside. Israel is a widower, bringing up a young daughter, Ada, and supporting his father-in-law. He … Read more