Reread in April 2015 and it was just as good as I remembered. Original review from 22nd April 2006. ISBN: 0098461560 Trans from the French: David Bellos Yes again a cover influenced purchase, so I am glad to report that a good cover can lead to a good read too. …
translated from French by Adriana Hunter It is eleven days since our first person narrator has died. He was just twenty one years old when meningitis took him. Now he tells the story of how his parents, specifically his father, are trying to cope with that hard fact. Their son …
Siss is on her way through the dark evening to meet Unn. They have been going to school together ever since Unn came to live with her Auntie, but this is the first time they will really have met, conversed, gotten to know one another. They are both eleven. They …
translated by David Wyllie : Read online at Project Gutenberg Most people are probably somewhat familiar with Franz Kafka. When we hear that something is Kafkaesque we think of the surreal and the absurd, but with a darkness. The Metamorphosis is possibly his most well known story. The tale of …
Read online – Gutenberg This is a book I would never have picked up if not for the fact that it is on the reading list of an online course I’ve just started. It is the story of the Chevalier Des Grieux, the second son of a wealthy, upper-class French …
One of my RIP reads Translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves Book 1 of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books In Barcelona a young boy is brought by his father to a secret place, The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. He is told he may take any book he wishes. That …
translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside. Seeing a couple break-up in public Kris goes over to apologise to the woman. He tells her that her ex is sorry for what he has done, that he wishes he hadn’t, that he wanted to say this himself but couldn’t. It makes …
The story of Enaiatollah Akbari, trans. from the Italian by Howard Curtis When Enaiat is around ten his mother takes him from his village in Afganistan and they travel Pakistan. And then, after a few days, she leaves him there, and goes back home to his younger brother and sister. …
Translated from the Irish (An tOileánach) by Robin Flower Tomás Ó Criomhthain, or, if you’d prefer an anglicised version, Thomas O’Crohan, was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1856. He lived all his life there as a farmer and fisherman, married and had ten children, although many of them …
by Raymond Radiguet translated by Christopher Moncrieff
Although the 1930’s mini challenge has come to an end, when I spotted this book at work I thought it might fit, and wanted to read more books of that time. Of course then I read the details and discovered that it was actually written earlier than that… Oh well :)
The devil in the flesh created quite a bit of a scandal when it was published, semi-autobiographical, the author wrote it from the age of sixteen to eighteen, after his own affair with a married woman. And that, my dears, is the central theme to this book. In fact, it is the end all and the be all of everything in this book. Our 15/16 year old narrator’s affair with a married woman. And I found that incredibly off-putting.
Author: Fred Vargas ; trans from the french by Sian Reynolds
An Adamsberg novel
Chief Inspector Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg has recently been transferred to Paris. His police methods aren’t exactly standard procedure and his inspectors have a lot to get used to. But they can have no doubt that he is a born policeman, and while even he is unable to explain how he arrives at his conclusions he is usually correct. In this case he thinks that there is something strange about the blue chalk circles that have been appearing in the Parisian streets. He is convinced that there is something sinister about them.
Author: Fred Vargas
Trans: Sian Reynolds
As you may already know I’m a big fan of Fred Vargas’ work and while this one is a library copy I’ll be buying this when it comes out in the proper size. I can’t stand these trade publications versions. They make no sense to me. All the negatives of a hardback with none of the positives. But enough about that; on to the plot.
The most straight-forward way of describing this book is to say that it is a murder-mystery. But with characters like Adamsberg there is no such thing as a straight-forward case. So when he spots something a little “off” about the two bodies that have shown up he decides that this case his rather than giving them over to the Drugs Squad.
