Archive for the ‘Translated’ Category

SEVEN YEARS by Peter Stamm

The title and the description on the back cover suggest a familiar story of adultery as in the movie The Seven Year Itch: husband, getting bored after seven years of marriage, looks for a younger and prettier woman elsewhere. And indeed there is something of this. But Swiss author Peter Stamm goes out of his way to minimize any normal comparisons between the women. Alexander, the first-person narrator, is married to Sonia, a fellow architect, but more brilliant, more determined than he is, from a wealthier family, beautiful, and self-assured. The other woman, Ivona, is actually an earlier acquaintance, an undocumented Polish worker, dowdy, inarticulate, religious, not at all attractive, yet familiar…

March 23, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Character Driven, Contemporary, Translated, World Lit

FROM THE LAND OF THE MOON by Milena Agus

These memories of her home island of Sardinia run like a litany through the mind of a love-sick woman on a visit to Milan in 1963. She is considering remaining on the mainland for ever, but the contrast between that sea of light and the fog-bound Northern city tells at least the reader why she cannot. It is actually one of relatively few physical descriptions of the island in this charming little novella by Milena Agus, which reads almost like a family memoir. But the book is filled with the spirit of Sardinian life, which seems to have preserved the old ways well beyond the end of the war, a combination of circumspection and joy.

March 14, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Family Matters, italy, Translated, World Lit

ENOUGH ABOUT LOVE by Herve Le Tellier

Thomas loves Louise, a lawyer. Louise is married to Romain, a scientist. Louise loves Thomas. Yves, a writer, loves Anna. Anna, a psychiatrist, loves Yves, a man she finds “unsettling.” Anna is married to Stan, an ophthalmologist. Thomas is Anna’s psychoanalyst. No, this isn’t an LSAT logic problem or a torrid soap opera. These are the characters that comprise Le Tellier’s urbane, au courant Paris comedy, ENOUGH ABOUT LOVE, a droll romp that is nevertheless intimate and complex within the playful pages.

March 4, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Contemporary, France, Humorous, Translated, World Lit

DESTINY AND DESIRE by Carlos Fuentes

Wow! This quotation should indicate why I both reveled in this rich and wonderful book and yet had such trouble getting through it. It was my first Fuentes, and may or may not be typical of his earlier style, but it is original, gloriously baroque, and alarmingly dense.

January 30, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Latin American/Caribbean, Mexico, Translated, World Lit

DANIEL by Henning Mankell

Book Quote: “I’m a little boy, he thought. I have travelled much too far away. My parents and the other people I lived with are dead. And yet they live. They are still closer to me than the man called Father and the woman who doesn’t dare come close enough for me to grab her. […]

December 15, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: 2010 Favorites, Africa, Class - Race - Gender, Facing History, Sweden, Translated, World Lit, y Award Winning Author

THE SHADOW WOMAN by Ake Edwardson

Sweden’s youngest ever chief inspector, at thirty-seven years old, cuts his vacation short when one of his team – a black, Swedish-born woman – has her jaw broken at the annual Gothenburg party, an outdoor late-summer festival at which nativist thugs get drunk and run amok, often in motorcycle gangs.

November 27, 2010 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Sleuths Series, Sweden, Swedish Crime Writer, Translated, World Lit, y Award Winning Author