Books We Missed: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CORPSE
Krzhizhanovsky comes across as a kind of Mikhail Bulgakov on drugs.
Everything Happens as It Does – Albena Stambolova
The stories of a handful of comingling lives unspool with the beguiling sense of fatedness that overtakes all events once they’ve happened the way they’ve happened to happen.
The Mehlis Report – Rabee Jaber
Some critics suggest that Jaber, who writes prolifically, needs to slow down or submit himself to an editor’s scissors. But The Mehlis Report makes for a glorious ramble, a leaping of the lines between investigation and gossip, between present and past, between life and death.
My Father’s Ghost is Climbing in the Rain – Patricio Pron
The difficulty of writing when one’s own story has been broken.
Under This Terrible Sun – Carlos Busqued
Stoner culture and noir, when both are at their best, are experiments in mood and atmospherics.
An irrepressible story, one that dissolves all certainty, and which can hardly be contained by words without threatening to burn them to the ground.
Algerian Chronicles – Albert Camus
In Algerian Chronicles we get both the settled position of Camus on Algerian independence and a study of what led to this exasperated tone – namely the insufficiencies of humanist principles to get a fair hearing during a particular kind of political sequence.
This is not a road novel, but a story of imprisonment that is always present even if it changes form.
The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell – Carlos Rojas
I’m not sure I need to know this Lorca.
The Sinistra Zone – Ádám Bodor
Though the anti-communist critique begins pointedly, after working its way through the book’s vulgar and whimsical digestive tract, it plops out the back end of the novel watered down and amorphous.