Suitcase of Books

Our editors thought the following books would be of special interest to our readers.

THE LOST DAUGHTER by Elena Ferrante Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Europa Editions, 2008 Reviewed by Joseph V. Tirella "The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand." With that simple and unnerving sentence on the second page of this astonishingly economic novel, author Elena Ferrante is giving readers fair warning: brace yourselves . . . (more...)

VIA DELLE OCHE by Carlo Lucarelli Translated from the Italian by Michael Reynolds Europa Editions, 2008 Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky If more historical crime fiction were like Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy, I'd probably read more of it than I do now. What makes Lucarelli's brand different? For one thing, the De Luca books are compact and almost devoid of picturesque period detail. (more...)

THE MODEL by Lars Saabye Christensen Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett Arcadia, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye "Historians who constantly present their Scotland Yard credentials," T. J. Clark writes, "never fail to miss what the real crime was."* In The Model, Lars Saabye Christensen makes certain that Scotland Yard historians are not disappointed. (more...)

THE DIVING POOL: THREE NOVELLAS by Yoko Ogawa Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder Picador, 2008 Reviewed by Christopher Cox The Diving Pool is the first collection by Ogawa to appear in English. Because she is relatively unknown to American readers, Picador has gone out of its way in promoting the book to assure us that she "has won every major Japanese literary award." On the evidence of this collection, Ogawa deserves whatever accolades have come her way. (more...)

THE OLD CHILD & OTHER STORIES and THE BOOK OF WORDS by Jenny Erpenbeck Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky New Directions, 2005, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye In Jenny Erpenbeck's fiction, girls are tabula rasa to be instructed step by step by teachers and fathers (state substitutes) to be handmaidens. They are empty vessels to be filled, captives in training to serve. (more...)

TO THIS DAY BY S. Y. Agnon Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin Toby Press, 2008 Reviewed by Tsipi Keller "During the Great War, I lived in the west of Berlin, in a room with a balcony in a small boarding house on Fasanenstrasse." So begins To This Day, Agnon's shortest novel, first published in Hebrew in 1952. (more...)

MISSING SOLUCH BY MAHMOUD DOWLATABADI Translated from the Farsi by Kamran Rastegar Melville House, 2007 Reviewed by Elham Gheytanchi Published during revolutionary times in Iran in 1979, Missing Soluch is a 500-page tribute to the socialist ideas that so enthused the Iranian intellectuals and writers of that period. (more...)

IN HER ABSENCE BY ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen Other Press, 2007 Reviewed by Michael K. Johnson Mario Lopez, a provincial bureaucrat in 1980's Spain, returns home from work to receive a passionate kiss from the young, sophisticated wife he thought had left him for good just a few days before.(more...)

SOUL BY ANDREY PLATONOV Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, with Katie Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman NYRB Classics, 2007 Reviewed by Alex Wenger Andrey Platonov brings out grand claims in others. Most excellent writers do this, but Platonov perhaps belongs in a special league.(more...)

THE REBELS BY SANDOR MARAI Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes Vintage, 2008 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye "The dead were fast swimmers. Sometimes they kept company, arriving in twos and threes, racing each other through town at night." Life would not be the same again, particularly for graduating seniors whose futures were already foreclosed by war.(more...)

THE BAD GIRL BY MARIO VARGAS LLOSA Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007 Reviewed by Brendan Hughes Mario Vargas Llosa's engaging novel The Bad Girl is not only a story of thwarted love, it is a haunted swath of the third world diaspora. Its characters are cast about the globe like seeds in the wind.(more...)

NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON BY PASCAL MERCIER Translated from the German by Barbara Harshav Grove Press, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye We speak about the book that changed our life, the encounter that sent us down a path, the person who turned us around. It is at such moments we say we become who we are, and we can no longer, as Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson discovers, return to the life we left. (more...)

THE FLYING CAMEL AND THE GOLDEN HUMP BY AHARON MEGGED Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden Toby Press, 2007 Reviewed by Tsipi Keller Published in Israel in 1982, and narrated in forty-two titled chapters, The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump, is an octopus of a novel, its referential tentacles reaching deep into the Western literary canon, as well as into the Mishna and the Talmud, all very much alive and vivid in the protagonist’s, Kalman Keren, large and generous imagination. (more...)

GUANTANAMO BY DOROTHEA DIECKMANN Translated from the German by Tim Mohr Soft Skull, 2007 Reviewed by Christopher Cox The United States has secret prisons spread throughout the world and a detention facility at a military base in Cuba specifically created to extract information from its inmates, most of whom are never charged with a crime. Faced with this news, Dorothea Dieckmann avoids high-minded rhetoric and angry condemnations (unlikely to be heard by the American government in any case, and none-too-rare as well) in favor of a short but potent novel that explores what imprisonment in this system does to one innocent man. (more...)

NINE BY ANDRZEJ STASIUK Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston Harcourt, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye It is the blasted landscape the films of Bela Tarr, Fred Kelemen and Ilya Khrzhanovsky conditioned us to see. A vista the surrealist landscapes of Jan Saudek opened up. The grim, abandoned backwater of an Eastern Europe writhing under runaway capitalism. We have entered Tarkovsky’s Zone. Raskolnikov stalks the streets of St. Petersburg. The bicycle chain swings in the street. An eye is gouged out.(more...)

THE TANGO SINGER BY TOMAS ELOY MARTINEZ Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean Bloomsbury, 2006 Reviewed by Margaret Carson Bruno Cadogan, a doctoral student in Spanish Literature at New York University, is making little progress on his dissertation, a study of Jorge Luis Borges's essays on the tango. As he wanders through the Village, a chance encounter with a specialist in Latin American culture launches him in a new direction... (more ...)

THE BELLY OF THE ATLANTIC BY FATOU DIOME Translated from the French by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz Serpent's Tail, 2006 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye The third-world native must leave home if he is not only to succeed but also triumph. If he does so, he can never be at home again. Salie, the Senegalese native, who narrates The Belly of the Atlantic, says on a visit to Niodior, the Senegalese island where she was born, that, "I go home as a tourist in my own country, for I have become the other for the people I continue to call my family." (more ...)

THE MAIAS BY ECA DE QUEIROS Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa New Directions, 2007 Reviewed by Alex Wenger In a preface to the 1903 printing of his novel A rebours, Joris-Karl Huysmans lamented the greatness of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. The "paradigm of Naturalism," the novel fired a generation of writers. But: "it brought us little profit. It was perfect down to the last detail, and even Flaubert himself could not write another such; we were all reduced…to beating and roaming about parallel tracks that had already been explored." (more ...)

ALLAH IS NOT OBLIGED BY AHMADOU KOUROUMA Translated from the French by Frank Wynne Anchor Books, 2007 Reviewed by Christopher Cox I was on a bus in Mali, somewhere in the desert between Bamako and Ségou, when we suddenly lurched to a stop. The sun was just starting to set, and the man sitting next to me said solemnly, "It's time for prayers." As we all shuffled off the bus, he threw his arm around the shoulders of the man sitting across the aisle and said, "Come on friend, let's go pray.".(more ...)

A RUSSIAN DIARY BY ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA Translated from the Russian by Arch Tait Random House, 2007 Reviewed by Michelle Risley Anna Politkovskaya’s brutal murder reveals the incredible risks and the dangers she faced as a journalist reporting on the limitations of Russian democracy. A Russian Diary, her blow-by-blow catalogue of power abuses by and under Putin's government was being translated when, on October 6, 2006, she was shot pointblank in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building.(more ...)

LOST PARADISE BY CEES NOOTEBOOM Translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty Grove Press, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye One does. She, someone, she is not sure, leaves her home in a wealthy neighborhood of Sao Paolo and drives, she does not know why, perhaps it had been the car or Bjork on the tape deck that had done the driving, to "the very worst favela of all, a hell rather than a paradise," where the engine dies and the favela dwellers come out of the night, "a hate and rage so deep that they could swallow you up forever" and leave her behind, "as if she were rubbish." (more ...)

MONTANO'S MALADY BY ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS Translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Dunne New Directions, paperback, 2007 Reviewed by Michael Kern Johnson In his second novel to be published in English in the US, Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas follows, sometimes quite literally, in the footsteps of authors as various as Cervantes, Montaigne, and Musil in a bi-continental search for the purpose of literature in a shifting world that seems evermore to question the need for literature. (more ...)

WRITTEN LIVES BY JAVIER MARIAS Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa New Directions, paperback, 2007 Reviewed by Alex Wenger It is a small but unmistakable invitation to chaos in the prologue to his newly translated Written Lives when Javier Marias deadpans that he has made up "almost nothing" in the content of this book. Written Lives is a collection of biographies of canonical authors, and making up anything would constitute an act of mischief upon both the reader and literary history as a whole. (more ...)

BESIDE & OTHER STORIES BY URI NISSAN GNESSIN Translated from the Hebrew by various translators Toby Press, 2007 Reviewed by Tsipi Keller Uri Nissan Gnessin was born in 1879 in a small town in the Ukraine. His father was a rabbi (a Lubavitcher), yet in addition to studying at his father`s yeshiva, Gnessin, with his father’s perhaps reluctant permission, immersed himself in secular subjects, seeing himself as part of the Haskala (Enlightenment) Movement (more ...)

PARADISE TRAVEL BY JORGE FRANCO Translated from the Spanish by Katharine Silver Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2006 Reviewed by Harry Morales Paradise Travel, the entrancing new novel by Jorge Franco, offers a heartbreaking and illuminating glimpse of the multi-faceted and confusing world of illegal immigrants in the U.S. (more ...)

THE MYSTERY GUEST BY GREGOIRE BOUILLIER Translated from the French by Lorin Stein Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2006 Reviewed by Richard McGill Murphy In the middle of a cold Sunday afternoon, a thirty-year-old Frenchman sleeps on the sofa in his darkened Paris apartment. The phone rings. He picks up the receiver and hears the voice of the woman who left him four years earlier without a word of explanation. None is forthcoming: after four years of silence, his vanished lover has simply called to invite him to a friend's birthday party. Thus begins The Mystery Guest, a brief but spirited romp through the jungles of masculine insecurity. (more ...)

A HEART SO WHITE BY JAVIAR MARIAS Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa New Directions, 2002 Reviewed by Samantha Schnee In A Heart So White Javier Marías examines the commonplace yet peculiar institution of marriage and all its attendant secrets and betrayals. Juan is a newlywed translator who shuttles between the UN in New York and the Hague for six to eight weeks at a time, while his young bride Luisa, also a translator, remains behind in Madrid to establish their home together. In Juan's absence she develops a close relationship with her enigmatic father-in-law, a charismatic art dealer named Ranz who, though in his seventies, has not lost the charm that enabled him to marry three times despite the fact that his first wife died mysteriously and the second committed suicide upon returning from their honeymoon.(more ...)

PRELIMINARIES BY S. YIZHAR Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange Introduction by Dan Miron Toby Press, 2007 Reviewed by Tsipi Keller S (milansky) Yizhar (1916-2006) was born in Rehovot, in what was then Ottoman Palestine. His father, Ze'ev Smilansky, also a writer, had arrived from Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, and, like the father plowing a field in the first pages of Preliminaries, had come to take part in "the spectacle of the birth of the new Jew in the new Land," carrying two books, "the Bible on one side and Tolstoy on the other, stuffed among clothes that are unsuited to the climate and the work." (more ...)

Out Stealing Horses and In the Wake by Per Petterson

The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, by Anonymous

A Woman in Jerusalem by A. B. Yehoshua

Almond by Nedjma

Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

Big Breasts & Wide Hips by Mo Yan

The Book about Blanche and Marie by Per Olov Enquist

Captain of the Sleepers by Mayra Montero

Celestial Harmonies by Péter Esterházy

Chile: A Traveler's Literary Companion edited by Katherine Silver Marvelously concise yet richly detailed, here are twenty-two short stories by Chilean masters.

Conjugal Love by Alberto Moravia

The Double by Jose Saramago

Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi

Götz and Meyer by David Albahari

Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas

The Heretic by Miguel Delibes

I Loved You for Your Voice by Sélim Nassib

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

The Inquisitors' Manual by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Inside and Other Short Fiction: Japanese Women on Japanese Women, compiled by Cathy Layne

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey by Salman Rushdie

Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño

Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé

Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

Lovers of Algeria by Anouar Benmalek

Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia

Monologue of a Dog: New Poems by Wisława Szymborska

Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg by Nina Berberova

The Nimrod Flipout by Etgar Keret

The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian

Q by Luther Blissett

S. A Novel of the Balkans by Slavenka Drakulić

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

The Silent Steppe by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Solibo Magnificent by Patrick Chamoiseau

Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian

The Successor by Ismail Kadare

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky

Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin

The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare

The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

White on Black by Ruben Gallego

World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany