There is an art to researching and writing biographies — at least good biographies. Although a work’s length and the amount of independent or original research may suggest how deeply a biographer delves into his subject, it certainly isn’t determinative of quality. At the same time, it is a field where the shorter [...]
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Tim July 19th, 2010 | Tags: biography, Book Reviews, Leo Tolstoy, nonfiction, Review Copy, Russian literature, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | 2 comments |
 Print This Post |  Email This PostIf someone mentions South America and Nazis, what comes to mind? For many, it’s the seemingly ubiquitous idea of Nazis escaping there after the war. While the concept has at least a few kernels of truth, it ignores or pushes aside events that swept up Latin America during the war. South American writers, though, [...] Tim July 1st, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, Notable Books Challenge, Review Copy, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment |
Print This Post | Email This PostIn his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire distinguished between history and fable. The former, he said, is “the recital of facts represented as true” whereas fable is “the recital of facts of facts represented as fiction.” In terms of historiography, that is a fair distinction. In terms of grasping history, though, fiction may be [...] Tim June 7th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, Books, fiction, Hans Fallada, historical fiction, Review Copy, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment |
Print This Post | Email This PostPhilosophical concepts tend to be topics for abstract discussions in ivory towers. In that setting, the real world sometimes seems secondary to applying various modes of logic and reasoning. Cameroon-born author Léonora Miano’s novel Dark Heart of the Night illustrates how fiction can personify such concepts and their role in the lives of [...] Tim March 30th, 2010 | Tags: Africa, Book Reviews, fiction, Review Copy, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed |
Print This Post | Email This PostThere’s certainly one thing Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin did. It had me pondering how, among other things, age impacts my reading tastes. About halfway through a noted author’s new novel set in South Dakota and its history, I gave up. I picked up a postapocalyptic novel, one of my favorite SF subgenres. I [...] Tim March 11th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed |
Print This Post | Email This PostI’ve written several times about my increasing interest in addiction to literature in translation. More than a third of the fiction I read last year consisted of works in translation. Last week certainly contributed to it continuing. Let me first note that I’m charter subscriber to Open Letter Books, so I automatically get 10 [...] Tim February 22nd, 2010 | Tags: Books, world literature | Category: A Reading Life | Comments are closed |
Print This Post | Email This Post“I had nothing to do with it.” That’s what the title character says in the opening sentence of Philippe Claudel’s novel Brodeck. And while Brodeck is right, he has been given the task of detailing how the small village in which he lives felt it had no choice but to kill an outsider. There are several [...] Tim February 16th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, historical fiction, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed |
Print This Post | Email This PostMicroreview: The Kindly Ones by Jonathan LittellA 975-page novel probably isn’t the best for the first “microreview,” especially one as widely praised and condemned as Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. The book won two of France’s highest literary awards before being translated into English — although it is written by an American. It is the fictional, but exceptionally well researched, memoir [...] Tim January 21st, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, historical fiction, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed |
Print This Post | Email This PostThe numbers will finish off the end of the year book-related posts. I’ve been keeping a book diary since the beginning of 1976. This year I reached a record number of books read, 111. That figure is tempered by the reverse of what affected last year’s numbers. Just as my 2008 [...] Tim January 1st, 2010 | Tags: bibliolust, biography, Books, history, memoir, nonfiction, world literature | Category: A Reading Life | One comment - (Comments are closed) |
Print This Post | Email This PostIn announcing that Herta Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy said simply that she is someone who, with her poetry and “the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” In The Appointment, the work of hers most recently translated into English, Müller shows that landscape is not [...] Tim December 30th, 2009 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, Review Copy, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | One comment - (Comments are closed) |
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  The views expressed here are mine and mine alone. I do not speak for my law partners, our associates, staff and clients or my family and friends. Not only should any opinions here not be attributed to them, chances are they probably don't agree with me.
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