Book review: Amitav Ghosh's latest, 'Gun Island'
The master does it again: but this time, it is not only a story of migration, it is a story of why and how there are migrations.
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Book review: Albert Camus’s “L’Etranger”
The Outsider? The Foreigner? The Stranger? One would expect more consensus regarding the translation of the title work of a Nobel prize-winning author. However, just the title of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic novel, L’Etranger, provokes reflection, as does every page of his terse prose
Read MoreBook review: “The Maze” by Panos Karnezis
More than its reviews, it was the novel’s setting just after the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) — in which a remaining and lost Greek regiment wandered the deserts of Anatolia to find the sea — that sparked my curiosity to read Panos Karnezis’s, The Maze. Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong and A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Story are […]
Read MoreBook review: “Ema, the Captive” by César Aira
Argentina, 1800s. A nubile captive, together with her infant child, are government prisoners, taken on long caravan as part of the supplies needed at the military outpost of a sinister colonial world deprived of women. It is just the beginning of the adventurous captivity of Ema, a “white” woman of unknown origins who is bartered […]
Read MoreBook review: “More” by Hakan Günday, translated by Zeynep Beler
Sometimes you just have to stick with books you don’t necessary like.
Read MoreBook Review: “War & Turpentine” by Stefan Hertsman
“I don’t like reading movies much” is how I often describe my rejection of contemporary literature that relies heavily on the surprising turns and twists of plot, because I’ve often found that the degree to which such stories are entertaining, they are bereft of the lyricism that invokes reflection and the lingering taste of beauty. […]
Read MoreBook review: ‘The Freethinker’s Prayer Book’ by Khushuwant Singh
I was surprised to find that it was not one of his excruciatingly irreverent novels, filled with acidic, sidesplitting truths about what people really do. It was his own very personal collection of some of literature’s greatest verses and aphorisms of writers, prophets, poets, philosophers, mystics and saints to support his “own religion”: a religion of a man who “does not believe in God”.
Read MoreBook review: Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat
The brilliant flower of a Tartar thistle stubbornly clinging to the middle of a field was the vision that provoked the memory of the great writer, recollecting the story he had heard of as a young man visiting the Caucasus. It was the tale of the famous Chechen rebel, Hadji Murat, whose unwavering allegiance to […]
Read MoreBook review: “Hiding in Plain Sight” by Nurrudin Farah
It takes great maturity to see the hairline fissures of culture and sexuality within an individual and a society with the prowess that makes Nurrudin Farah a great inspiration.
Read MoreBook review: Orhan Pamuk’s ‘A strangeness in my mind’
‘WHAT MAKES CITY LIFE MEANINGFUL IS THE THINGS WE HIDE.’
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