With this book, I have to admit defeat, or at least a change of plan. I wanted to review every book I read on this site, but I can’t review this. How to reduce the life work of one of…
These are three essays on the notion of migration for the writer, mostly explained through other writers such as Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and Naipaul. In the first essay, The Spokesman & the Tribe, Jin explores the balance between the individual…
A man dies slowly and in great agony. He ponders the meaning of life, and this increases his anguish: even worse than the physical pain of a slow, lingering death is the spiritual anguish of realising he has wasted his…
Joe Noone seems to have it all – a beautiful house built into a Mallorca hillside, a comfortable lifestyle, a beautiful girlfriend. Yet it’s New Year’s Eve 2007 and as fireworks go off around him and people celebrate, he seems…
I hardly ever read poetry, but for some reason T.S. Eliot’s poetry speaks to me. Perhaps it’s because, like Eliot, I used to work at a bank in the City of London, and the feeling of his poems is the…
There are three separate stories in this book: one is the killing of Russian Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by the Chicago Chief of Police in 1908; another is the struggle of the narrator, Bosnian immigrant Brik, to adapt to life…
The book was unfinished in Leopardi's lifetime, and perhaps the finished version would have been brilliant. This sequence of half-formed thoughts and bon mots, however, was just a quick and not particularly satisfying read.
First of all, let me say that I’m a bit of an Ishiguro fan. I’ve read all but one of his novels, and love his understated writing style and knack of dealing with big themes while appearing to do no…