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 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.

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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 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.

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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 being the ultimate artistic act that a human being can perform, a true suicide is one without a motive. If one has desires, even the littlest of projections into the future, it means that one is not really capable of committing suicide. The same character asks: what was the reason behind God's creation of Earth and people? He couldn't have made it either from love, wisdom or desire for power and justice. He concludes that God had no real motive, it was just because. An authentic suicide should be the same, just because.

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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, 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.

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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 Empire under the Sassanid dynasty, where Mani was born and where he spread his religious beliefs.

Little information about the prophet was preserved throughout the centuries, until a parchment was discovered in 1969, containing accounts of Mani's life and fragments of his writings.

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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 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.

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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 work, but was not able to grasp it. Moreover, I let my personal weaknesses flood my perceiving of Kawabata's writing, judging it and condemning it for the uncomfortable and unbearable feelings he aroused inside me.

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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 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.

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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 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.

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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 feeling I got while reading his stories, like I was sitting together with Bolaño at a bonfire and he was murmuring some tales about his life. And they felt so real that I could have believed everything he would tell me.

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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, 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. 

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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, which I find a really good novel (but then, I've read the Romanian translation). Is there a serious deficit of translators from Albanian into English? It seems that Kadare’s works were regularly translated into French by his long-standing collaborator, Jusuf Vrioni, and the English editions have the latter's translations as a starting point. Weird.

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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 was a child on the poster who might suffer (not die, though, as children don't usually die if they are main characters).
I'm quite upset with myself that I feel such a heart-wrenching pity for animals, because I can't properly watch certain movies (for example, Hachiko was more than I could bear). I also can't stand torture scenes - yuck! Curiously enough, I have a fascination with horror movies...

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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 press.

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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 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.

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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 inside a grotesque nightmare, with walled-up windows and doors, not being able to find my way out. If, by chance, I was brusquely expelled into reality, I was compelled by an utter fascination to go back in and have my brains turned to mush.

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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 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.

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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 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.

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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 by looking at some images: I was elated, then I was sad, then I was happy, then I was elated some more.

As I hadn't previously read anything about The Arrival, I thought that this was some sort of science-fiction graphic novel (silly me!). And maybe it was better that way, because I had to put my mind to work to understand what was going on.

The protagonist leaves his wife and daughter behind and travels to a distant land. He might as well be going to a different planet, because everything there is so strange and far from the normality he's used to. You must see with your own eyes the world imagined by Shaun Tan, you must! I was like in a trance, scanning the whole picture for the tiniest details.

The white dot that looks like a moon is in fact the hot air balloon 

which brings the protagonist into the foreign land.

The people there appear to each have a pet, which are peculiar animals, and soon the emigrant will find a pet of his own (it felt so heartwarming, like connecting to the character on paper - strange!). This presence of animals throughout the drawings reminded me of Philip Pullman's dæmons, a very interesting concept from The Golden Compass series.


We follow the protagonist as he struggles to find a lodging and a job, his encounter with different people (some are emigrants like himself), his acquaintance with the foreign language, the strange landscape, the peculiar fruits and animals. It is an old story dressed in new, wonderful clothes.

I would recommend this to everybody, young and old, even if they are not fans of the graphic novel genre.

This piece of music (Erik Satie - Gnossienne 4) should definitely be the soundtrack of The Arrival:

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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.

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While I found Ice to be an interesting read, with moments of pure beauty and originality, in the end I was glad it was over, because it had failed to keep me under its spell for its entirety. While being a short book, to me it seemed awfully long, possibly because it is repetitive on the verge of becoming annoying. The magic that worked its charm in the beginning started to lose its power when the same things happened again and again, when I got tired of the uncertainty and wanted to tell the difference between what was real and what was not. And I do love tangled, fantastic tales (Mulholland Drive is one of my all-time favorite movies).

At first, I was mesmerized by the strange story of a man set out in search of a fragile girl with white hair, in a menacing landscape that is gradually overtaken by ice. His quest becomes an obsession and he  follows her to some disaster-stricken places, but she always seems to sleep through his fingers. His search is impeded by a third character, the Ward, who seems to have taken possession of the girl, but also by the fact that the girl herself does not want to be found and rescued by the man.

Ice has no actual plot and no reliable storyteller. It's like falling through a series of weird dreams, not being able to tell the difference between reality and unconsciousness. The nameless narrator has some recurrent daydreams about the girl he is chasing, some of  which left a powerful impression upon me, and for that alone it was worth reading this story.

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