Category Archives: Reviews

Dedicated to Piranesi (Посвящается Пиранези) by Joseph Brodsky

Posted on May 11, 2018 by

A while ago, my tweet about the Joseph Brodsky poem apparently recounting the conversation between the too tiny figures at the bottom of Piranesi’s famous etching provoked lively interest among my literary-minded followers. Apart from the highly original premise of … Continue reading →

Posted in Poetry, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Secret Year (Тайный год) by Mikhail Gigolashvili

Posted on April 29, 2018 by

It wasn’t Sergey Eizenstein’s bombastic epic Ivan the Terrible that Mikhail Gigolashvili had at the back of his mind when writing The Secret Year, but, as he mentioned in an interview, Alexei German’s infernal fresco Hard to be a God. … Continue reading →

Posted in Fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Guest Post: Luís Miguel Rosa on Dom Tanas de Barbatanas by Tomaz de Figueiredo

Posted on April 13, 2018 by

Dom Tanas de Barbatanas is a weird novel even by the standards of the Portuguese fiction of its time. When it arrived in bookstores in 1962, Portugal was already awash in the literary experimentalism that electrified a big chunk of … Continue reading →

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Guest Post: Matthias Friedrich on En Australiareise (A Voyage to Australia) by Svein Jarvoll

Posted on January 2, 2018 by

Not long ago, I wrote a brief post about the Norwegian writer Thure Erik Lund and his mind-boggling tetralogy Myrbråtenfortellingene. As you might already know, most of English-speaking readers first learnt about Lund from his mega-popular compatriot Karl Ove Knausgård. I have recently … Continue reading →

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The Harmonious Forest (O Bosque Harmonioso) by Augusto Abelaira

Posted on December 13, 2017 by

licobodiscivacacotopelinamgdevogradivenliptordugalsentu rfgalipntocsersagalmutpvar No, this is not some tongue-twisting onomatopoeic coinage from Finnegans Wake. As a matter of fact, in the language of  a certain tribe inhabiting the interior of Java Island, this word is habitually used  as the coordinate conjunction … Continue reading →

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Solenoid (Solenoide, Solenoid) by Mircea Cărtărescu

Posted on November 20, 2017 by

I have read Mircea Cărtărescu’s latest novel in Marian Ochoa de Eribe’s Spanish translation, which was kindly provided for this review by the publishing house Impedimenta. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that there will be an English translation any time soon – indirect evidence of that is the … Continue reading →

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Bludgeoning Dwarfs to Death (Matando enanos a garrotazos) by Alberto Laiseca

Posted on August 4, 2017 by

The debut short-story collection by the recently departed Argentine maverick Alberto Laiseca contains the seeds of all the major themes that will be brought later to exuberant fruition in his mega-novel The Sorias. The thirteen stories first published together in … Continue reading →

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The Levant (Le Levant, Levantul) by Mircea Cărtărescu

Posted on May 5, 2017 by

I have chosen for this review the French translation of The Levant carried out by Nicolas Cavaillès. It’s essential to let you know from the outset that neither this version, nor the Spanish and the Swedish ones are the translations of … Continue reading →

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The Troiacord (El Troiacord) by Miquel de Palol

Posted on November 10, 2016 by

This review is the culmination of a decade-long obsession. I first encountered the name of Miquel de Palol in a book on contemporary Spanish literature in which there wasn’t a word on The Troiacord, his major work. This reticence, as I … Continue reading →

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Merlin or the Waste Land (Merlin oder Das wüste Land) by Tankred Dorst (in collaboration with Ursula Ehler)

Posted on August 7, 2016 by

If you, like myself, have suffered through Thomas Malory’s indigestible Le Morte Darthur, you would feel vindicated by the large-scale deconstruction of the Arthurian romances undertaken by Tankred Dorst and his collaborator Ursula Ehler in this epic play. The 1981 premiere of … Continue reading →

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