By the Rivers of Babylon – António Lobo Antunes
A leisurely drift through the circadian rhythms of night and day, while past and present elements mingle in a hospital room, as a projection of the protagonist’s consciousness.
Rereading Silence: From the Diaries of Those Years – Yevsey Tseytlin
Rereading Silence is a diary and a confession, a portrait of an incredibly cruel epoch and of the narrator’s soul.
Return to Latvia – Marina Jarre
What it might have cost Jarre emotionally to face this awful truth, one can only imagine. But we readers are the grateful, if tearful, recipients of this revelatory largesse.
Second Star: And Other Reasons for Lingering – Philippe Delerm
Delerm calls on the body, mind, and visual field to preserve the essence of a moment. . . . [His] direct, humorous observations are both relatable and attentive to the largely unnoticed aspects of daily life.
As often happens when you have nothing left to lose, everything just clicked, the voice she had been honing throughout her artistic career was now razor-sharp, as was her sense of humor, righteous indignation, and impatience with classical, “proper” style . . .
Tomas Nevinson – Javier Marías
Reality may be unruly and even illegible, and though we may want and even need to forget that at times, our escape is not without its consequences. Someone always pays.
With Kairos, Erpenbeck proves the impossibility, irresponsibility even, of an easy binary and reminds us that the only thing we can be certain of is an ending that will bring along change.
A History of the Island – Eugene Vodolazkin
Looming large in the minds of the citizens is a prophecy of final doom by Agafon the Forward-Looking, recurring in moments of political instability.
For an elegiac work, Hervelino has little in the way of lamentation or solace. “Death was there, there was no theorizing it or solving it.”
Concerning My Daughter – Kim Hye-jin
Tightly structured, carefully crafted . . . no word, symbol, metaphor, or nuance is wasted.