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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