The latest addition to my website is Fausta Cialente‘s Ballata Levantina (The Levantines). This novel tells the story of well-to-do European expatriates (primarily but certainly not exclusively Italian) living in Egypt (primarily Alexandria) from the 1920s to the end of World War II. Our heroine is Daniela. Her grandmother, Francesca, had been a successful dancer … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maki Kashimada‘s 六〇〇〇度の愛 (Love at Six Thousand Degrees). This is something of a Japanese response to the film Hiroshima mon amour, scripted by Marguerite Duras, about a French woman who has an affair in Hiroshima with a Japanese man whose relatives were killed by the atom bomb. In … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Taras Prokhasko‘s НепрОсті (The Unsimple). This is a post-modern, magic realism novel set in the Carpathians. It is set primarily in the fairly remote, fictitious town of Ialivets. The town had been created by Franzysk, usually known as Franz, in 1888. He had had married Anna and they … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Igor Kaczurowsky‘s Шлях невідомого (Because Deserters Are Immortal). The book is set in Ukraine in late 1941 when the Germans are invading the Soviet Union. Our hero is Serhiy Remez who is not a keen supporter of the Soviet Union as most of his family has been murdered … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yuriy Vynnychuk‘s Танґо смерті (Tango of Death). This is a very complex novel, set mainly in Lviv. It is told in alternating chapters. The first set tells the story of four boys/men whose fathers were killedby the Russian force of Grigory Kotovsky, a professional bandit and vicious thug. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vasily Grossman‘s Народ бессмертен (The People Immortal; No Beautiful Nights) . The book had been translated into English in 1945 but this version uses the original manuscript, some of which was censored, often by Grossman himself. It is an account of the relatively early period of the Nazi … Read more
The latest addition to my website is
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
The latest addition to my website is Per Petterson‘s Ut og stjæle hester (Out Stealing Horses). Trond Sander is sixty-seven. Within the space of a month , his second wife is killed in a car crash, in which he is injured, and his sister dies of cancer. He decides that it is time to retire … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sigurd Hoel‘s Møte ved Milepelen (Meeting at the Milestone). Published only two years after World War II, this book had considerable impact in Norway, as it deals with the issue of Norwegian collaboration with the Nazis. Our unnamed narrator has provided a safe house for the Resistance and … Read more