Tag: Fiction
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“Baumgartner” by Paul Auster
Saying that Sy Baumgartner, an about-to-retire Princeton professor, doesn’t have a good day is an understatement: first, he burns his hand leaving a pot on the stove, then falls down the stairs showing, completely unnecessary, the way to a meter reading technician. I expected that things would get worse, but no, there were no broken…
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“The Premonition” by Banana Yoshimoto
“The Premonition” by Banana Yoshimoto was written in 1988 but has only been translated into English by Asa Yoneda. It’s a short novel, a coming-of-age story of nineteen-year-old Yayoi, who has a premonition that something significant happened in her childhood. She feels her loving parents may not be her biological parents and is strangely drawn…
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“The Future Future” by Adam Thirlwell
In Adam Thirlwell’s “The Future Future” we meet Celine, a 19-year-old, wealthy, married girl living in pre-revolution Paris when she finds herself in a problematic situation; someone is distributing pornographic pamphlets with her image, describing her habits and life. The accusations are false, but the series becomes popular, and soon, Celine is on everybody’s lips…
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“Finders Keepers” by Natalie Barelli
Rose, the 23-year-old protagonist of “Finders Keepers,” is one of those female characters that I instinctively like. She’s a mixture of vulnerability, a survivor of a challenging childhood, and a girl who blames herself to the point of believing she might be a psychopath. Judging from her recollection of the past, a reader must be…
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“Touched” by Walter Mosley
“Touched,” the new novel by Walter Mosley, recognized mainly by his crime novels, is rooted in our fear for the future of humans and our planet. It finally happens: the different beings from “a vast range of planes and realities,” as the author suggests, have decided that our species has entered the stage when our…
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“Small Worlds” by Caleb Azumah Nelson
“Small Worlds” is the second novel by a young British-Ghananian writer and photographer, Caleb Azumah Nelson. It’s a contemporary coming-of-age story of Stephen, whose family emigrated from Ghana to find a better life in England. The novel is written in a poetic, documentary style as we follow Stephen’s path to adulthood. He is a gentle…
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“The Pole” by J.M. Coetzee
“The Pole” is the second book by J.M. Coetzee I read, “Disgrace” being the first one, remaining one of my favorite novels of all time. This time, the author tells the story of love between 70-year-old Polish virtuoso pianist Witold and a 50-year-old woman, Beatriz. Beatriz is a patron of arts, living in Barcelona, and…
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“The Raging Storm” by Ann Cleeves
The residents of Greystone, a small fishing town in North Devon, England, like to keep their problems hidden from outsiders. But when the celebrity sailor and adventure seeker, Jem Rosco, is found dead, his body lying in a boat in the legendary and feared Scully Cove’s water, they have no choice but to accept the…
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“Inside Information” by Eshkol Nevo
“Inside Information” is an excellent title for this novel by Eshkol Nevo. We are given three very loosely interconnected stories, all told in the first person narrative, so the reader is looking at the events from the narrator’s point of view, favoring his or her interpretation. But there are mysteries, and things may differ from…
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“Open Throat” by Henry Hoke
“Open Throat” by Henry Hoke is a slim but perhaps the most beautiful novel I read this year. It’s told from the perspective of a mountain lion who lives in the desert hills below the Hollywood sign. The mountain lion is queer: his lover, “the kill sharer,” was another male mountain lion. The hunt becomes…
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