Book Reviews
Tomás Eloy Martínez’s “The Tango Singer”
Bruno Cadogan, a doctoral student in Spanish Literature at New York University, is making little progress on his dissertation, a study of Jorge Luis Borges's essays on the tango. As he ...
Aharon Megged’s “The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump”
"Every book one opens, one finds in it things not found before."—S. Y. Agnon Published in Israel in 1982, and narrated in forty-two titled chapters, The Flying Camel and the ...
Dorothea Dieckmann’s “Guantanamo”
The United States has secret prisons spread throughout the world and a detention facility at a military base in Cuba specifically created to extract information from its inmates, most of whom ...
Andrzej Stasiuk’s “Nine”
REQUIEM FOR NOTHING It is the blasted landscape the films of Bela Tarr, Fred Kelemen and Ilya Khrzhanovsky conditioned us to see. A vista the surrealist landscapes of Jan Saudek opened up. The ...
Fatou Diome’s “The Belly of the Atlantic”
"How each of us manages to make more evident his own resistance. For that is the way a man comes to core. By way of, the discovery of, his own resistance. (It is also, mark you, the way a ...
Eça de Queirós’s “The Maias”
In a preface to the 1903 printing of his novel A rebours, Joris-Karl Huysmans lamented the greatness of Flaubert's Sentimental Education. The "paradigm of Naturalism," the novel ...
Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is not Obliged
I was on a bus in Mali, somewhere in the desert between Bamako and Ségou, when we suddenly lurched to a stop. The sun was just starting to set, and the man sitting next to me said ...
“Lost Paradise” by Cees Nooteboom
"The Darkness of the Lived Moment" One does. She, someone, she is not sure, leaves her home in a wealthy neighborhood of Sao Paolo and drives, she does not know why, perhaps it had ...
Anna Politkovskaya “A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death…”
Anna Politkovskaya's brutal murder reveals the incredible risks and the dangers she faced as a journalist reporting on the limitations of Russian democracy. A Russian Diary, her blow-by-blow ...
“Written Lives” by Javier Marias
It is a small but unmistakable invitation to chaos in the prologue to his newly translated Written Lives when Javier Marias deadpans that he has made up "almost nothing" in the content ...
“Beside & Other Stories” by Uri Nissan Gnessin
Uri Nissan Gnessin was born in 1879 in a small town in the Ukraine. His father was a rabbi (a Lubavitcher), yet in addition to studying at his father`s yeshiva, Gnessin, with his father's ...
Enrique Vila-Matas’s “Montano’s Malady”
In his second novel to be published in English in the US, Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas follows, sometimes quite literally, in the footsteps of authors as various as Cervantes, Montaigne, ...
“Paradise Travel” by Jorge Franco
Paradise Travel, the entrancing new novel by Jorge Franco, offers a heartbreaking and illuminating glimpse of the multi-faceted and confusing world of illegal immigrants in the U.S. For Franco, ...
The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier
In the middle of a cold Sunday afternoon, a thirty-year-old Frenchman sleeps on the sofa in his darkened Paris apartment. The phone rings. He picks up the receiver and hears the voice of the ...
“A Heart So White” by Javier Marías
In A Heart So White Javier Marías examines the commonplace yet peculiar institution of marriage and all its attendant secrets and betrayals. Juan is a newlywed translator who shuttles ...
“Preliminaries” by S. Yizhar
S (milansky) Yizhar (1916-2006) was born in Rehovot, in what was then Ottoman Palestine. His father, Ze'ev Smilansky, also a writer, had arrived from Russia at the turn of the twentieth ...
“Out Stealing Horses” and “In the Wake” by Per Petterson
Reviewed by Radhika Jones The narrator of Out Stealing Horses, sixty-seven-year-old Trond, is a man equally consumed by his past and his present. This balancing act between the reflectiveness ...
“The Savage Detectives” by Roberto Bolaño
When we consider Roberto Bolaño, we might also think of D. H. Lawrence or Yukio Mishima. Like them, he lived a mythic, tragic life. Like them, he compressed into a short period--in his ...
“Lost City Radio” by Daniel Alarcón
As the title might imply, the setting for this engaging first novel is never clearly defined. We are told of a chaotic South American city, nameless villages stashed away in an untamed jungle, ...
“The Inquisitors’ Manual” by António Lobo Antunes
The Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes has devoted much of his literary career to illuminating the period in his country's history from the waning years of the Salazar ...
Patrick Chamoiseau “Solibo Magnificent”
On Carnival evening in Fort-de-France, a magnificent teller of tales suddenly collapses on stage and dies, his throat snickt by the word. Whodunit and how? This rollicking novel packed with ...
We
Before there was Brave New World, before there was Orwell's 1984, there was We. This classic dystopian fantasy is more philosophical and, despite its precision, humane than the stinging ...
The Double
Most English classes teach us that parables and morality tales are antiquated forms of literature, replaced, in the way of natural evolution, by that creation of hardy Anglo-Saxon realism, the ...
Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia
Love and betrayal complicate a robbery gone wrong in this edgy true-crime novel based on a 1965 Argentine bank robbery. There's the drama of the botched raid itself, followed by a blowout ...
Season of Migration to the North
A first reading of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North can be a bewildering experience. The episodic manner in which the story is laid out means that important information about ...
The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare
Two books could not differ more in their approach to the barbarities visited upon the Balkans than S. and The Three-Arched Bridge. While Drakulić is at heart a reporter laying bare sickening ...
Chile: A Traveler’s Literary Companion
Marvelously concise yet richly detailed, here are twenty-two short stories by masters of Chilean literature (known and unknown) from Jose Donoso to Pablo Neruda. Organized as a travelogue, the ...
THE ALMOND
If The Almond's subtitle-"The sexual awakening of a Muslim woman"-is not enough to draw a prospective reader's eye, its cover almost certainly is. The American edition of the ...
The World Republic of Letters
"National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and every one must strive to hasten its approach," declared J.W. Goethe in 1827. He was ...
S. A Novel of the Balkans
S. is less a work of fiction than an assault. Reading this novel is like entering a long, dark alley in an unfamiliar city. The pressure--and even stark fear--does not relent until the path has ...
A WOMAN IN BERLIN: EIGHT WEEKS IN THE CONQUERED CITY
A Woman in Berlin could be a figment of a historian's imagination, so neatly and thoroughly does it satisfy curiosity about a moment in time. The anonymous journal of a thirty-four-year-old ...
HAVE MERCY ON US ALL
Have Mercy on Us All is a crime novel in the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. It is the twelfth in a series by the French author Fred Vargas, a woman who decided to take on ...
Summer In Baden-Baden
Plunging into this novel, one immediately loses one's bearings. The unrelenting rush of words triggers a dreamlike state that recedes only with the final line. The story opens with an ...
LOVERS OF ALGERIA by Anouar Benmalek
"This place is not worth living in," Jallal, the nine-year old orphan who spends his days on the streets selling peanuts and rummaging through garbage dumps, cries out again and again. ...
Q
Luther Blissett is a Jamaican soccer player who, when acquired by the team AC Milan in the early 1980s, saw his career plummet as he was subjected to the sarcasm and racism of Italian soccer ...
Péter Esterházy’s CELESTIAL HARMONIES
The stories that make up Celestial Harmonies, Péter Esterházy's exhilarating family saga, have doubtless been passed down through countless generations, but surely they have ...
SNOW
Snow is not the first thing that comes to mind when most Westerners think of Turkey. Americans are most likely to have encountered only the country's Mediterranean coast, bikini-clad and by ...
The Jaguar’s Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey by Salman Rushdie
Discovering Victoria Ocampo translations of Tagore (Tago-ray in local speak) is only one of the surprises in store when East encounters West in this magically realist voyage through Nicaragua by ...
THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING
Constructed as a series of vignettes about characters whose fates will soon converge, a stylistic device highly popular in today's Hollywood, Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany's Arabic ...
MONOLOGUE OF A DOG: NEW POEMS
Of the countries of the European Union, Poland boasts a comparatively high number of living or late poets who are known to the general public of American readers. This familiarity has often had ...
THE STALIN FRONT
The first person we meet in this German war novel is already dead. Like most of the characters he is identified only by his rank (Lance Corporal). Killed by a rocket salvo, he dangles from a ...
Marjane Satrapi “Embroideries”
After a hearty lunch in Tehran, the men go off to sleep while the women wash the dishes. Marji prepares the samovar, steeping the tea for the proper forty-five minutes. She serves the older ...
MOURA: THE DANGEROUS LIFE OF THE BARONESS BUDBERG
Nina Berberova's Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg chronicles a riveting moment in modern history through the eyes of Baroness Maria ("Moura") Ignatievna ...
Ernesto Sábato “The Tunnel”
At an art exhibition, a painter sees a woman admiring one of his works. Surprisingly, she has focused on the exact corner of the canvas that holds the key to the painting: a remote scene of a ...
Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé
Lyrical language drives this novel set in World War II Barcelona and narrated by the unborn brother of the central character, fourteen-year-old David Bartra. David lives with his mother, Rosa, ...
WHITE ON BLACK
In 1968, Ignacio Gallego, the patriarch of the Spanish Community Party, severed ties with a willful daughter, who had just given birth to a toddler with cerebral palsy in Moscow. The Kremlin ...
The Noodle Maker
The pace of change in China over the last fifteen years has been extraordinarily fast; the pace at which its literature reaches us in translation shamefully slow. Chinese dissident writer Ma ...
Götz and Meyer by David Albahari
Serbian writer David Albahari's new novel is a deeply unnerving tale of obsession and memory, part Holocaust story and part rumination on the incompatibility of history and storytelling. The ...
Conjugal Love by Alberto Moravia
Throughout his long and astonishingly productive career, Alberto Moravia never stopped exploring the erotic highways and byways. Of course, he tended to look on the dark side. Readers of his ...
A Woman in Jerusalem by A. B. Yehoshua
"He had now devoted three whole days to this woman, laboring faithfully on her behalf after giving his impulsive word to make her anonymous death his business." This short sentence (p. ...
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews New Directions, 2006 Few writers translated into English in the past several years have generated as much excitement as Roberto Bolaño. ...
Amulet by Roberto Bolaño
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews New Directions, 2006 The narrator of Roberto Bolaño's Amulet, his latest work to be translated into English, promises in its first ...
The Heretic by Miguel Delibes
This international bestseller follows the life of a boy born on the day the Protestant reformation began-when Martin Luther nailed his list of ninety-five theses to a church door in ...
The Silent Steppe by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov
The Silent Steppe: The Story of a Kazakh Nomad under Stalin is a vivid, personal story of courage and hope in the face of persecution and terror. It breathes new life into a neglected chapter of ...
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