KLATSAND, FORMERLY FISH CREEK, IN OREGON is a tiny settlement that grows over four generations to become an off-the-beaten-track and less than fashionable coastal resort town. It lies on the Pacific coast of Oregon and is only separated from that mighty body of water by the Searoad of the title. In one poem, ten short [...]
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE BOOKS THAT I HAVE READ RECENTLY. Having read Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, which describes life in France after the German invasion in June 1940, I was struck by how Fallada shows the Gestapo in Berlin obsessively celebrating the French defeat. In this sense, Alone in Berlin is almost a [...]
I SEEM TO HAVE A THING FOR BOOKS WITH A WOMAN’S HEART that use orphan-like characters in poor and crumbling habitats. If there are small practical points of magic or folklore interwoven, then we’ll be friends for life. Shelter, by Frances Greenslade, can now be added to this list. Shelter, set in British Colombia, Canada, [...]
THE JAPANESE NOVELIST, HARUKI MURAKAMI (1949 -) IS A LITERARY PHENOMENON. His novel, Norwegian Wood, a moving love story, sold four million copies in Japan. Both the Japanese original and English translation of his latest work, 1Q84 (a multi-lingual pun on Orwell), had queues snaking around bookshops in London and New York at midnight, drawing parallels [...]
DAVID A. TROMAN REVIEWS A SCIENTIFIC ESSAY. Synopsis: The universe and all therein, from one singularity to another singularity, and the impossibility of infinity. What is God? Comment: It would be tempting to think that a scientific essay written – with the intention of its place in the literary canon being that of a prose [...]
DAVID A. TROMAN REVIEWS ROBERT CHANDLER’S TRANSLATION OF LESKOV’S WORK. Book Synopsis: Katerina Lvovna Izmailova is the lady of the title. A merchant’s wife in mid-nineteenth century Russia, she is given into a loveless marriage, which moves her from the prison of her parents’ house to that of her husband’s. Her husband goes away on [...]
THIS BOOK WON THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE IN 2002. It is a weird and wonderful book telling the singularly unlikely story of the shipwreck of a young Indian, Piscine, the Pi of the title, who traverses the seas in a lifeboat for 227 days in the company of a four hundred and fifty pound tiger, and self-evidently [...]
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV’S THE MASTER AND MARGARITA IS A RUSSIAN CLASSIC OF THE 1930s. It presents an extraordinary surrealist vision in which the Devil comes to Moscow and unmasks the vanity and venality of the literary establishment. This is interspersed with an historic account of the life of Pontius Pilate, penned by the eponymous Master of the [...]
THIS BOOK CONCENTRATES PRINCIPALLY ON FOURTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND, which is, historically speaking, post the medieval age. One suspects – and the many references to sources throughout the book attest – that Mortimer made this choice of the time frame because of the range of sources available in the fourteenth century. This point aside, the book [...]
THIS BOOK IS BY FAR ONE OF THE MOST ‘WACKY’ STORIES THAT I HAVE EVER READ. The plot of this extraordinary shaggy dog story takes numerous bizarre turns. It is only at the end, and in a final author’s letter, that it becomes clear that the plot is a hallucination by the hero in the [...]
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