The latest addition to my website is Michal Ajvaz‘s Cesta na jih (Journey to the South). This is an amazing work, starting with a ballet of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and where one of the dancers murders an audience member. Martin who saw the murder and who is writing a thesis on Kant, and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Lyudmila Petrushevskaya‘s Нас украли. История преступлений (Kidnapped). Petrushevskaya is best-known for her weird/dark tales and though this is a novel it takes the form of several tales within tales within tales… We start with a man, Sergei Sertsov, who made his fortune (illegally) after the fall of his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Pig Tale. This is a very witty book, damning human foibles, told from the point of view of a five year old boar (i.e. male pig) called Ed. Ed manages to escape from the pig farm and we follow his adventures (which are being recounted to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Beka Adamashvili‘s ამ რომანში ყველა კვდება (Everybody Dies in this Novel) . This is a wonderful postmodern romp by a young Georgian writer in which a fictional character called Memento Mori tries to save characters who get killed in literature (starting with Romeo and Juliet) and then teams … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pat Gray‘s Narrator. The narrator is called, yes, Mr (Basil) Narrator. He is in (a fictitious) Morocco working for a British engineering firm and trying to get a project fior a pump-house approved which had been on track but now is not. This seemingly requires getting to the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ellis Sharp‘s Month of the Drowned Dog. This is a decidedly postmodern novel, as we might expect from Sharp. Sharp, the author, tells of a character known only as the writer who had written a book which he had abandoned and is now returning to. We get (more … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mia Couto‘s Mulheres de Cinzas (Woman of the Ashes). This is the first book in a trilogy about Portugal’s colonisation of the part of Africa that came to be Mozambique, at the end of the nineteenth century. We follow a village, Nkokolani, inhabited by the Chopi people. They … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sergei Lebedev‘s Титан (A Present Past: Titan and Other Chronicles). This is not a novel but, as Lebedev says in his introduction, the stories are based on his and others’ reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union and share a mystical topography in which the legacy of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yao-Chang Chen‘s 傀儡花 (Puppet Flower). The novel is primarily set in Taiwan in 1867 when Taiwan is partially controlled by the the Qing Dynasty and partially by the indigenous tribes. Various foreign powers – Netherlands, Portugal, Britain and the US have been involved, though the US less so … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Cheon Myeong-Kwan‘s 고래 (Whale). This is an incredibly complicated and, at times, improbable story about various characters during the second part of the 20th century. Geumbok escapes her brutal father, with the aid of an itinerant fishmonger who, thanks to Geumbok’s entrepreneurial skills, becomes rich but loses her … Read more