World Literature, World fiction, European literature
Though I read Girls Against God twice, I confess to you I don’t get it. So I am going to spend this review struggling to make sense of a novel I find nonsensical. And please know, when I say I don’t get it, I don’t mean I don’t like it, for I found it...
I cursed myself to finish every novel I begin. Sometimes, that is easy and thrilling, but over times, it becomes a chore. Operation Napoleon belongs to the latter group. But I finished the novel, and now I’m ready for my review. Here we go. When the Americans find a Nazi plane on a glacier...
During a recent trip to Spokane, I went to Auntie’s Bookstore to buy a novel to read on the train. I searched for a half-hour, or maybe a whole hour, but I ended up buying the first novel that caught my eye when I was in the store only for a minute. It was...
There are novels to understand, but there are novels to experience. After reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday twice—the second time to remind me of the plot—I concluded that it is securely in the second category. The first time I read it was before my stroke. I not saying that there...
I visited the Lost Young cafe in Paris in 1976. A bunch of us wanted to see a real Parisian nightclub, and our guide agreed to take us. I fear something was lost in translation, because the dank club where he took us was a far cry from our imagination. No one was that...
I don’t believe I’ve ever read any book that I have more trouble reviewing than Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Though it’s classified as a novel, it is unlike any novel I had read before. In truth, as I read it, I thought of it more as an epic poem than a novel. It seems...
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse tells the story about the titular character and his spiritual quest. Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin, a Hindu priest, who realizes he wasn’t suited for the traditional path towards enlightenment. Along with his friend, Govinda, he joins the Samanas, a sect of ascetics, but even the life of...
Memories of My Melancholy Whores begins with its protagonist and narrator declaring the objectionable goal of wanting to have sex with a teenaged virgin. It’s the gift he wants to give himself for his ninetieth birthday. He contacted the madame at the local brothel, who finds a fourteen-year-old girl to fulfill his needs. Since...
“Poetry,” one of my literature professors had said long ago in class, “is about mixed emotions.” She was talking about Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” a short poem loaded with both positive and negative imagery and invoking both happy and frightening emotions. But she could’ve been talking about any great poem, and not just...
Piercing begins with a chilling scene and intensifies from there. It’s an unrelenting, violent novel that refuses to turn a blind eye to its characters’ deranged compulsions. It’s a novel about compulsions, but not the run-of-the-mill compulsions that cause most of us to overeat, drink too much, or binge out with Netflix for seven...
