I’m a Communist Biddy! - Dan Lungu

My rating: 5/5 Book review: For those of you who have seen Tales from the Golden Age and enjoyed it, Dan Lungu's novel could reiterate that experience. There is also a movie made after the novel in 2013.  I’m a Communist Biddy! is nowhere near a profound, serious novel; it...

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Vain Art of the Fugue - Dumitru Tsepeneag

My rating: 4/5 Book review: In Romanian, the word fugă has a double meaning: that of run/flight and that of fugue, the polyphonic musical composition in which the theme is repeated by several voices and developed through the counterpoint technique. The word is used in this novel both ways: the...

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Satantango - László Krasznahorkai

My rating: 5/5 Book review: I am reading Satantango at my parents' house. A communist block of flats, tiny cubicles with thin walls, through which the noise of a Tv set penetrates from my neighbor upstairs. Later on, my mother comes in my room and falls asleep on my bed. Poor mom, she is always...

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The Hooligan's Return: A Memoir - Norman Manea

My rating: 4/5 Nothing is incompatible in Romania. In 1986, at the age of 50 and three years before the fall of communism in Romania, Norman Manea decided to emigrate abroad, first to Germany, later reaching the final destination - The Paradise, The Other World, The United States. He was to come...

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Burial Rites - Hannah Kent

My rating: 4/5 Book review: You will be lost, you are not going home, you are gone, silence will claim you, suck your life down into its black waters and churn out stars that might remember you, but if they do they will not say, they will not say, and if no one will say your name you are forgotten....

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The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie - Ágota Kristof

My rating: 5/5 Book review: When I was younger, I used to have a recurring dream about a world I haven't experienced in real life: I found myself in a place that was being bombed. I was hiding inside a house, a deafening noise around me; through the windows I could see the planes and hear the...

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Independent People - Halldór Laxness

My rating: 5/5 Book review: What does it mean being independent? Stop for a moment and think: do you consider yourself an independent person? I've never asked myself this question seriously before reading this novel, although I've always tried to preserve my freedom by sticking to a few personal...

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There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby - Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

My rating: 3/5 Book review: Now that's a puzzling title, who almost screams: "Marketing plans!", because there is no story with such title in this collection. There is one story with the idea, yes, but the title is less shocking and more evocative - Revenge. I've learnt my lesson, in that I'll...

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Our Circus Presents - Lucian Dan Teodorovici

My rating: 3/5 Book review: What is it that pushes people towards committing suicide? I thought the answer was simple: a grief and desperation so great that would obliterate any trace of hope and desire. One of the characters in Our Circus Presents has a different opinion, though: besides...

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Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me - Javier Marías

My rating: 5/5 Book Review: This novel blew me away and I'm still working to fit my pieces together. I got lost into Marías' winding train of thoughts and I'm still trying to find my way back to reality. What was it that I liked so much about this novel? Well, everything: the plot,...

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The Gardens of Light - Amin Maalouf

My rating: 3/5 Book review: Prophet Mani, founder of Manichaeism, is one of the forgotten figures of history, although he was very popular (and also much hated) in the 3rd century Babylonia - today's Iraq. Forgotten is also the town of Ctesiphon (near present-day Baghdad), capital of the Persian...

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The Seed - Tarjei Vesaas

My rating: 4/5 Book review: After the first pages, I thought that I will read the novel from the perspective of two sows with cute piglets and one boar, mad with boredom (I wouldn't have minded). Big, fat sows with narrow foreheads and ugly fangs, which lie passively as a latent threat. But later...

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The Fish Can Sing - Halldór Laxness

My rating: 5/5 Book review: The fish can sing just like a bird, And grazes on the moorland scree, While cattle in a lowing herd Roam the rolling sea. Starting from this Icelandic paradox put in verse, Halldór Laxness weaves an enchanting tale on the outskirts of Reykjavík, in a time when the...

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The Dancing Girl of Izu - Yasunari Kawabata

My rating: 3/5 Book review: I'm hovering between 3 and 4 stars for this book and I can't decide, because I liked some of the stories, others depressed me, while one in particular was horrifying. I mostly feel like a superficial and uninitiated reader who stood at the foot of a complex...

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The Ice Palace - Tarjei Vesaas

My rating: 5/5 Book review: A novel with a scarcity of words but with a delicate, dreamlike poetry; a story that makes you taste the coldness and isolation of winter in the middle of the summer; an adult writer who can see through the soul of an eleven year girl, down to her utmost fears; a remembrance...

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Little Fingers - Filip Florian

My rating: 4/5 Book review: I haven't read a novel by a Romanian author in a long time. I, along with many other young people here, tend to avoid local literature because: a) it may be full of social commentary and communism issues (people are already fed up with it, yet it may prove interesting...

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Târfe asasine / Putas asesinas - Roberto Bolaño

My rating: 4 out of 5 Book review: Putas asesinas or Murderous Bitches is my first encounter with the prose of Roberto Bolaño. What can I say? I'm hooked by his talent as a story teller, by his imagination, weaving real life facts with fabricated ones. What I liked the most was the dreamy...

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Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo

My rating: 5 out of 5 Book review: At the end of a lot of struggling days and a 70-pages document with new words, I've managed to finish my first novel read in Spanish. As I feel like I've earned a prize, I have to thank Linda and Dolors for their support! I'm not sure I've chosen the right novel...

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The Door - Magda Szabó

My rating: 5/5 Book review: Romanians and Hungarians have a long history of not liking each other. I'm no xenophobe and I have a few friends in Budapest, yet I was sometimes wondering: what does Hungary have to offer in terms of art, music and literature? They could say the same about Romanians,...

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The Ghost Rider - Ismail Kadaré

Rating: 4/5 Book Review: The Ghost Rider was initially published in English under the title Doruntine and it is another case of translation from French, not from the original Albanian. This situation puzzles me and has turned many people off from reading Ismail Kadaré's The Palace of Dreams,...

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I Am Legend - Richard Matheson

My rating: 4/5 Book review: I haven't watched the movie for one particular reason: there was a dog on the poster and only the thought that it might suffer and die (which I didn't actually know for a fact) was enough to avoid the movie. The same thing happened with The Road, because there...

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Ports of Call - Amin Maalouf

My rating: 4 out of 5 Book review: Amin Maalouf was born in Beirut, his mother in Cairo (where his parents also married) and he later moved to France, when the Lebanese civil war started in 1975. All these places, plus others like Istanbul and Haifa, are present in Ports of Call, as the characters...

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The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Böll

        Rating: 4 out of 5 Book review: The voice of this novel was something new to me: it is written in the form of a report, apparently reserved and unbiased, which presents the slow but effective process of Katharina Blum's public humiliation by police and pres...

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Memories of My Melancholy Whores - Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Rating: 4 out of 5 Book review: I began reading this book in English, but something didn't feel right. The musicality of Márquez' writing was not there. I couldn't believe the old man changed his style over the years. I looked for the Romanian translation and felt relieved: everything sounded...

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The Obscene Bird of Night - José Donoso

My rating: 4/5 Book review: The Obscene Bird of Night is one strange, twisted, haunting, obscene book. It may well be the most difficult novel I've read so far. There were moments when I felt that I could connect to it and even understand it, but most of the time I felt like floating...

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Doctor Glas - Hjalmar Söderberg

      Rating: 4 out of 5 Book review: This short novel is a melancholic guide of Stockholm. It is a compendium of thoughts and reflections upon life from a peculiar character. It is a story of alienation and unrequited love. And it is also the story of a planned murder. Although...

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The Guillotine Squad - Guillermo Arriaga

My rating: 4 out of 5 Book review: I haven't seen any of the Arriaga/Iñárritu movies because they seemed too tough to watch, but this doesn't mean I wasn't curious about this Mexican (script)writer. Especially when I found the first book he had published in a second-hand bookstore, for...

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The Arrival - Shaun Tan

Rating: 5 out of 5 Book review: This is an amazing book, although it has no words. The narrative is slowly building from the wonderful drawings of Shaun Tan and from the imagination and sensibility of each reader. I could not believe that I was experiencing such a complex display of feelings just...

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Ice - Anna Kavan

Rating: 4 out of 5 Book review: Edit (104 days later): Despite my initial 3 star rating, I feel compelled to give this book another star. I must admit that Ice is still haunting me, as some of the powerful images it aroused are still vivid in my mind. Few books have this power over me. ----------------------- While...

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

My rating: 5 out of 5 Book review: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is only partly a coming-of-age novel. There are several threads of the story, following the five main characters of the book, all interesting people, with a deep inner world. One would think they could cure their loneliness once they...

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