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 main character is caught in a perpetual and futile run, while the novel is structured similarly to a Bach fugue, with different voices that replay and develop the main theme, but also with additions that extend the complexity of the story.
As a critic states in the foreword, this novel which cannot be retold has, precisely for that reason, a fresh quality, even after 40 years from its conception. Founder of the oneiric aestheticism, Dumitru Ţepeneag conceived his first novel after the logic (or non-logic) of dreams, as opposed to the surrealism, which uses dreams as a source of images and motifs.
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 so tired... Soon, the muffled noise of the Tv intermingles with my mother's snores. I am expelled from the depths of evil; I leave behind the colony, the putrid rooms, the decay. I come back to my banal reality. I glimpse at the half-eaten cake, the orderly room, my warm feet. I hold the book open with my toes, fingers plucked deep in my ears. Slowly, word upon word, I can hear once again the rumbling of thunder, the incessant tapping of rain. Shadowy hands pull me once more inside the sickening gloom and despair. I am back in the colony, caught up in a maddening Satan's tango.
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 explosions. I was living intensely in a dimension that was at war; I felt the terror, the helplessness. I have no idea why I had those dreams. I haven't lived through a war, I don't know how bombardments feel like. But my dreams felt real nonetheless. It could have been my reality in another life, if I were to believe in it. Or it could be the reality of my dreams, a realm where my mind continues to live without my body.
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 guidelines: I avoid becoming a working slave; I can't keep my mouth shut when I observe injustice or stupidity; I can't keep my head down to gain favors; I can't stand being tied to a person just out of politeness.
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, the subtle humor, the flow of words, the ideas, the profound pondering. I found and lost myself at the same time, and I really can't explain this; if you haven't done it yet, you should read the novel and see for yourself.
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 on, the frame widens and we find ourselves on a small island with green pastures and fertile soil, with a few inhabitants that are decent, hard working people.
One day, a foreigner arrives, in search of the elusive land that would silence the voices in his head and cure him of his fears. Not only he does not find his peace here (or maybe he does, sort of), but he will bring chaos into this heavenly corner of the world; he will disrupt its balance and harmony, turning kind people into savage beasts.
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 price of a Bible was equal to that of a heifer and people still tried to cure headaches by smearing their faces with warm cow-dung. Some say that The Fish Can Sing is a coming-of-age novel, but I don't really see it that way; it is more the diary of a place, Brekkukot, and the portrait of a generation long gone, in a time when Reykjavík was just a bunch of houses inhabited by farmers and fishermen.
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 of childhood with all its awkward moments; two girls that are linked in life and beyond; a secret that is never spoken, buried forever in ice; a promise that is kept, no matter if it brings estrangement; a wonder of nature, the ice palace, with its cold and deadly beauty.
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 for a foreigner);
b) it might be brimming with obscene words (although there is a market for that, I'm sure);
or, simply, c) it may turn out to be a disappointment.
Surely, this could be a reaction of a country whose members are not overly patriotic, read less and less and are not able to come to terms with their place (and time) in history.
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, too; what the heck, we are questioning our place in art history ourselves! Well, after reading this novel, I've come to think that Hungarians do have their hidden gems, just the same as we do. Magda Szabó's novel was my first foray into Hungarian literature and my first step towards abating my ignorance.
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 move to and fro between them. Above all there is the Levant, the Ancient Land, the magical place where the sun rises (in French, levant means rising, while Orient derives from the Latin oriens meaning east).
One day, while on the metro, the narrator recognizes a man from a picture in his history book (how crazy is that?). He follows the man and eventually manages to talk to him, even break the barrier of being strangers, which prompts the old man to recount his life. When the narrator asks Ossyan Ketabdar to begin his story from the moment he was born, the latter replies: Are you sure the life of a human being begins at birth? What follows is a story so complex and unbelievable that it almost seems to be true. Some of it has the dreamlike quality of a fairy tale, or a tale from A Thousand and One Nights.
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 press.
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 the way it should with Márquez. The poetry was still there. That was the first time I looked admiringly to my native language - it has its positive attributes after all, mainly the kinship with Latin. Now I may only imagine how the original sounds like, another reason to feel sorry for knowing Spanish only at a basic-medium level.
Rating: 4 out of 5
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 more than a hundred years old, this novel feels as fresh as if written yesterday. The only hint of its age are depictions of places in Stockholm that no longer exist and some obsolete debates (on abortion, for example), but otherwise the language doesn't fell dated and the ideas are as universal as ever.
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 1.50 $. Yup, sometimes my reading flow goes with the bargains that I find on the way.
I was neither prepared to like it, nor dislike it, a state of mind that I wish I had with every book that I read. What I enjoyed most of all in The Guillotine Squad was the dark humor, a feature that I've always welcomed in books and movies.
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 get to know each other, but things are more complex than that and don't always turn out the way they should. And do they actually come to know each other in the end?
John Singer is a deaf-mute who is living with his only friend, a fat Greek, Spiros Antanopoulos, who has the same handicap. After the latter is sent to a mental hospital, Singer moves to a boarding house and gets to know a handful of people, who from then on start to gravitate around him, eager to speak about their thoughts and torments, having the impression that the mute has a superior understanding of life. While with Spiros, he was the one who used to talk with his hands every evening, but now he has become the one who listens.
Mick Kelly is a 14-year old girl with a complex inner world; she dreams of becoming a musician and of travelling to distant countries covered in snow. She is slowly discovering her womanliness and sexuality. I loved the metaphor of her soul divided in an outer and inner chamber, I loved the way she perceived music.
Her connection to music was disturbing for me, as I too used to hear music in my head and dreamed of playing it on the piano. Not unlike Mick, I studied the piano for eight years, yet I got lazy in the end. Reading about what she felt about music brought about memories of my own ambitions and felt sadder to have failed.
Dr. Copeland is an intelligent black man whose purpose in life is to educate his people, to transform their beliefs and help them transcend their condition, in order to make a better life for the black race. He became estranged from his wife and children and he had failed to pass his revolutionary ideas onto them. Through his story, we get to know the harsh lives of black people and their resistance to change.
Jack Blount is a half-mad guy, a wandered who made a sudden appearance in town, claiming he could understand, that he knew a truth that others were too blind to see. He finds comfort in the mute John Singer, whose silence gives him the aura of understanding and knowing.
Bill Brannon is the owner of a cafe where all the characters gather to eat and drink. He doesn't say much, but we get to know his thoughts. He is attracted by strange people, by outcasts, and so he takes pity on Jack Blount.
I was wrong about this book on so many levels! First, I thought it was written by a guy, when instead Carson was a woman, who was merely 23 when she wrote this book. Wow! Such complexity of language and ideas is usually bestowed upon writers much later, after life has granted experience and depth. I can't imagine how someone can write like this at 23!
Secondly, I thought I was getting a cheerful, carefree coming-of-age novel, when instead I was immersed in a complex, serious and heart-wrenching story. There's so much loneliness in here and the events seem to head for disaster. I would imagine all sorts of terrible things that could happen to the characters. The pressure was constantly building, it seemed a question of paragraphs until the disaster would struck, yet it only came towards the ending.
Thirdly, I expected some romance going on, but I didn't get any - in the standard form, that is. There was love, but it was awkward, unfulfilled, sometimes twisted. The strangest of them all was the powerful attachment that Singer felt for his friend Spiros, despite the Greek's passive, greedy and mean character. In the end, nobody was capable to understand what lay beneath Singer's calm, friendly appearance and what went on in his soul. They were just as lonely and estranged as in the beginning of the story...
My rating: 4 out of 5
Book review:
Although it took me some days to finish this book, I enjoyed every bit of it (except, maybe, the political stuff). It is such a dense prose that I couldn't read more than a chapter at a time, as it claimed quite an effort from my brain cells. I had to dwell on a lot of paragraphs in order to understand the meaning, and I must confess that, sometimes, I didn't quite get it. Yet, there was such beauty and philosophy in Circle in the grass that I feel I must read this book again, in the same manner - small doses, time to ponder, because too much of it will make my head explode.
Circle in the grass is a story about passionate love, art and politics, with deep introspects about human condition, poetry, love, relationships. There are some strong characters here, whose inner and outer lives are followed in turns, and there are also amazing fable-like stories from parts of Italy.
And yes, above all there is Rome, with its winding streets and compelling architecture, which will stir a deep melancholy for those who have visited this wonderful city at some point in their lives.
In 1978, Hanna Piccard, a Dutch journalist, comes with her two cats to work in Rome and there she meets Joe Kurhajec, a Vietnam-veteran turned sculptor. Through him she comes to know Andrea Simonetti, a divorced poet who lives with his 13-year-old daughter, Leda.
Soon, a tormenting love sparks between Hanna and Andrea, despite the fact that they are so different. The novel follows their love from the awkward beginning, through the difficult time they have to adapt to each other, till the final stage (which I won't spoil). While Hanna is more action-oriented, jealous, suspicious and deeply engaged in their affair, Andrea is contemplative, distant and sometimes cruel, fearing the loss of individuality (or at least this is how I got it).
Meanwhile, Andrea is working on his very long poem, in which one of the characters is inspired by his employer and friend Zucarelli, the head of the museum where Andrea works as an art historian. And how I loved when, towards the end, Zucarelli denies the role that it was attributed to him in the poem and chooses the fate of the hero instead...
Hanna, Andrea, Leda and Zucarelli take turns in expressing their inner world in this novel, through voices and personalities which are quite distinct. Leda is creative, intelligent and almost as contemplative as her father. She gradually leaves her childhood behind and has her first crush, on a stranger.
The political background is also of importance - Italy is under threat of terrorism from the Red Brigades and the events culminate with the abduction of Aldo Moro, ex-prime-minister. There are some well-spoken words about the trajectory of the consumerist world and about why people are revolting - politics has never been my cup of tea, yet it was interesting to read Oek de Jong's ideas on the subject.
For more experienced readers, Circle in the grass may even earn 5 stars. Such a pity this book is so little known...
EDIT: Apparently, this book is not translated into English and it is such a loss! This book deserves a wider audience, it is a truly great novel.
My rating: 5 out of 5
Book review:
This was quite a powerful story, like a tornado sweeping off the outside world and leaving nothing but me and this book. At first, the violence made it a little hard to read (I was not sure if I would finish it), but eventually I was so immersed in the story that I came back to reality just to pray that the ending won't be a bad one. And it wasn't.
From the opening chapter, I knew this book will be different from the ones I've read so far. It is a harsh real-life story of people living at the edge of society, people who struggle for a job and a better life - not always through honest means. Although they are not entirely faithful, they turn to God in the key moments of their existence, either to pray or to ask for an answer.
Come Dio comanda is the story of a 13-year old boy, Cristiano Zena, who lives with his father, Rino, an unemployed drunkard and Nazi sympathizer who has violent episodes, but who loves his son more than his life. Rino's two friends, a mentally handicapped guy and another drunkard whose wife has left him, are the only thing close to a family for Cristiano. Despite the rough world in which he lives, Cristiano is not a tough boy. He has problems adapting, he doesn't have other friends apart from his father's, and he is shy with girls.
Everything will change beginning one stormy night, when the three grownups decide to steal money from an ATM. The original plan will never take place, as each of them takes a different path that night, that will change their lives forever. Cristiano is swept into the unfolding events, an experience that will affect and transform him deeply.
The novel is cinematic, the characters are skilfully built, I was right there amidst the story. No wonder it was made into a film - it has the perfect plot for an European movie. What an incredible book! I'm still under its influence.
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