After a four year sabbatical from novel-writing, the prolific and provocative Juan José Millás returns this month to sweep the Spanish bestseller lists. A slim novel at just 135 pages, Laura and Julio takes place in the author’s unusual world of the Borgesian double, exploring the idea of the original versus the copy with the…Continue Reading
Jealousy, Hope, Love, Frustration, Pinochet & the PLO Craftsman, plumber, brick-layer, ironware merchant, script writer, filmmaker, and now novelist, Nan Aurousseau has hewed his vast trove of on-the-job tales into a thrilling novel called Overalls. Like so many beleaguered artists, the adroit Frenchman wrote the autobiographical bestseller (not a memoir, mind you) while down and…Continue Reading
My Generation Down and Out in Denmark, Angot Gasps in France, And Sweden’s Crime Duo Hits 30 Junkies, pushers, ‘narco-tarts’, and their degenerate demi-monde come crackling to life in Denmark, as Jakob Ejersbo’s novel Nordkraft (the title translates roughly as “Northern Power”) barrels up the list with its “oddly encouraging” tale of a generation searching…Continue Reading
Sketches of Spain Gala’s Jungle of Love and Aldecoa’s Enigma, Plus Holst’s Uppity Danish Women At the colossal Fnac megastore in Barcelona last month, you had to bushwhack your way past bales of Jean Auel’s The Shelters of Stone — the ubiquitously promoted tome could be had in no less than four separate editions: Catalan,…Continue Reading
The 9th International Budapest Book Festival was bursting at the seams this year, with 600 publishers jammed into the Budapest Convention Centre from April 18-21. As some 60,000 visitors browsed 40,000 books on display, it’s no wonder that the punchy fair organizers — those being the Hungarian Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association in partnership with the…Continue Reading
Parisian Pandemonium Vargas Plagues Paris, Orsenna’s French Lessons, And Brouwers Skewers Dutch Boomers The specter of bubonic plague coming down the mail chute rattles all of Paris in an uncannily topical work by the French archaeologist and crime writer Fred Vargas. In the author’s latest novel, Leave Quickly and Return Late (which, incidentally, was written…Continue Reading
Dictators’ Desserts Trujillo’s Dominican Feast and Franco’s Fall in Spain, Plus Cremer Redux in Holland Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa conquers lists in both Spain and Argentina with The Goat’s Feast, a novel that’s captivated critics (it “makes one’s flesh creep,” one wrote admiringly) and has been hailed as a revival of Vargas Llosa’s best…Continue Reading
