Recent Purchases

[Stewart]

It's always interesting to see what books people have been buying, so let us know what's been upsetting your bank balance of late:

For me, I've bought a few translated titles this week. These are:

• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  • Since it's one of the Russian biggies I thought I'd give it a shot. Plus it was in a three-for-two offer along with:
• Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy
  • Thinner than Anna Karenina, so may be more of a sandpit book before jumping up the aforementioned.
• Perfume, Patrick Süskind
  • I already had a copy of this, but much preferred the recently released Penguin Modern Classics edition. And it completed the three-for-two.
• Cold Skin, Albert Sánchez Piñol
  • There's not that many books, as far as I'm aware, translated from Catalan and I thought I'd give this horror novel a try.
• The Wedding, Yann Queffélec
  • I'd seen mention of it on obooki's Prix Goncourt reviews and, on seeing it on eBay, decided to give it a go.
• Piano, Jean Echenoz
  • I liked the cover.
• Botchan, Sōseki Natsume
  • I just spotted it in Waterstones and decided to give it a shot. I already have his Kokoro, but haven't read it yet.

So far, I haven't yet purchased anything translated in this particular week, but I can claim two easily memorable novels from past weeks

• Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen, a fictional cavalcade of events and characters living through the Atomic Age, from Los Alamos to Skinheads; and
• Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine, easily the best novel I have read in the past couple of years.

and I am leaning toward purchasing one for next week (or sooner)

• The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector

This week, though, has been John Banville, Athena and Shroud.

[nnyhav]

A dozen, recently procured (in the last month), mainly from bookculture (translator in parens):
Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line (H William Tjalsma)
Gyula Krudy, Sunflower (John Lukacs)
Dubravka Ugresic, The Ministry of Pain (Michael Henry Heim)
Imre Kertesz, Liquidation (Tim Wilkinson)
Joseph Roth, The Emperor's Tomb (John Hoare)
Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz (Alfred Mac Adam)
Nagai Kafu, During the Rains & Flowers in the Shade (Lane Dunlop)
Anita Desai, Baumgartner's Bombay
Witold Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk (Carolyn French & Nina Karsov)
Stephane Mallarme, Divagations (Barbara Johnson)
Arno Schmidt, Collected Novellas and Collected Stories (John E. Woods)

procured and processed; the first two highly recommended, the last a disappointment:
Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish (Bogdan Rakic & Stephen M. Dickey)
V.S.Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
Lydia Salvayre, The Power of Flies (Jane Kuntz)

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Dabbler

Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen

That's the only one I've not bothered - yet! - to pick up from the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist. But I've certainly heard good things about it. And Verhaeghen must be committed to have written the book in Dutch and then effectively write it all over again, in English translation: all six hundred pages of it.

Originally Posted by nnyhav

Gyula Krudy, Sunflower (John Lukacs)

I'm guessing this is the NYRB edition? Have you read it yet? I was looking at it yesterday deciding whether I want it. (Well, of course I want it.)

[saliotthomas]

All theses are download in audio format,the place i live in as a very poor selection of books
Yasmina Khadra - The Attack
Henry david thoreau - Walden
Edward P Jones - The Known World - 2004 Pulitzer (Fiction)
John Banville - The Untouchable
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
John Man -Attila

One "real" book
Jim Harrison-A good day to die(an hard to resist title!)

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by saliotthomas

Yasmina Khadra - The Attack

Have you read any of his other books? I remember reading - well, starting - The Swallows Of Kabul and then setting it aside. More from being busy in other areas, than because I wasn't enjoying it.

[saliotthomas]

Originally Posted by Stewart

Have you read any of his other books? I remember reading - well, starting - The Swallows Of Kabul and then setting it aside. More from being busy in other areas, than because I wasn't enjoying it.

Not it's a first,i got it because of the dublin prize list you showed,and as Andrei Makine was on it,this on caught my eyes.I shall read it next.When I finish the Sea by Banville

[Hong]

Hello, everyone. *wave*

Tomorrow the following are coming to me. Since I don't know the English version, I'll just post book covers here.

1 Jonathan Strange
2 & 3 are written by Japanese writers.

[nnyhav]

Originally Posted by Stewart

I'm guessing this is the NYRB edition? Have you read it yet? I was looking at it yesterday deciding whether I want it. (Well, of course I want it.)

Yes and no (respectively). Krudy is new to me (as are Erofeev and Nagai Kafu [oops, and Desai; as Selimovic was]), the rest I've read something by. Getting started on the Schmidt novellas now.

EDIT: to the prior listing actually -- Krudy's translator is John Batki. The other John wrote the intro. (And gets billing on the cover.) I always try to include reference to the translator, credit where due.

[Catch22]

Just purchased:

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
.....Jean-Dominique Bauby (tr: Jeremy Leggatt)

Sulphuric Acid
.....Amélie Nothomb (tr: Shaun Whiteside)

The latter after reading about her here yesterday, the former because I'd heard such good things about the recent film, but never got around to seeing it. Should always do the book first though - paid through the nose for English language text in Madrid of course...

I really like those Japanese covers there. Please excuse the sidetracking, but the bottom ones remind me of the DVD cases for the excellent Twilight Samurai and something else, I forget what - but there are two or more different titles which use the same cover art.

EDIT: The cover for When The Last Sword Is Drawn is similar too. Those are two films well worth watching for fans of Japanese cinema.

[saliotthomas]

Originally Posted by Catch22

Just purchased:

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
.....Jean-Dominique Bauby (tr: Jeremy Leggatt)

.

I read this few years ago and it still give me shivers just to think of it.Frightening.

[Stewart]

Lobster, Guillaume Lecasble

There was no way I was not buying this book after reading what it was about:

Aboard the Titanic, Lobster watches Angelina eat his father, but is then saved from the cooking pot himself when the ship strikes the iceberg and the pot falls to the floor. But he is now a changed Lobster: attracted sexually to the very human who ate his father. He and Angelina have one life-changing erotic encounter before their tragic separation, following an ugly incident in one of the lifeboats...

[obooki]

I've been very restrained this week, I think: only 3 books so far:

1. The Collected Works of Pierre Louys
2. The Tempest, by Juan Manuel de Prada
3. The Day the Leader was Killed, by Naguib Mahfouz

Hope you enjoy Queffelec's The Wedding, Stewart - a narrow 2nd so far to Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers. Picked up another Prix Goncourt winner the other week (it was 9 days' ago to be exact, so I'm not counting it here), just by chance in a charity shop: Romain Gary's The Roots of Heaven. That makes another 11, I think, that I've purchased - but who knows when I'll get time to read them.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by obooki

Hope you enjoy Queffelec's The Wedding, Stewart - a narrow 2nd so far to Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers.

It arrived this morning from whatever vendor I got it from. As (sort of) expected it was full of yellowed old pages, which I personally don't like. I'm usually a stickler for pristine pages and when I've finished a book you would never believe it had been read. But you sold me on it, so I suppose I can read it one day and pass it on elsewhere. At least it's not smelling of smoke, another bête noire of buying second hand books.

[saliotthomas]

Originally Posted by obooki

Romain Gary's The Roots of Heaven.

This one is a pure marvel!"Les racine du ciel"A very interesting book about freedom,occidental view of African probleme.This one really stand appart.

[Stewart]

I have a liking for Penguin Modern Classics and bought a handful this morning. A couple of theatre theory, which aren't really relevant here. And these three:

• The Assistant, Robert Walser
• A Tranquil Star, Primo Levi
• Love In A Fallen City and Other Stories, Eileen Chang

[Stewart]

I accidentally walked into a book store over lunch and came out with a copy of Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Observed Trains. I've been eyeing it a for a while now - along with his Too Loud A Solitude - and have been wanting to read him for a while.

I've already got his I Served The King Of England but I suspect sitting down to read that will require a chosen afternoon as what few chapters there are come in at sizable chunks that makes dipping in and out a tricky prospect. Although I suspect his Dancing Lessons For The Advanced In Age may be even more of harder title to read, given that it's a single sentence that runs over a hundred pages.

[A Common Reader]

Stewart

Perfume (Suskind) is a very fine book in my view - far better than you might be led to believe by the publicity. The film was pretty good too (unusuall).

My latest purchases are:

Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke
Asne Seierstad: The Angel of Grozny, Inside Cheyna
Stefan Zweig: Fantastic Night and other short stories

Oh yes, I've just subscribed to the re-launched Granta after a couple of years break - it looks really good.

Tom
http://www.acommonreader.org.uk

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by A Common Reader

Stewart

Perfume (Suskind) is a very fine book in my view - far better than you might be led to believe by the publicity. The film was pretty good too (unusuall).

The copy I previously bought was just before the movie came out as I wanted to read it but didn't want a movie tie-in copy. But then I never read the book or saw the film and, seeing it in the new Penguin Modern Classics style and also in a book store offer, I knew I wanted that.

Asne Seierstad: The Angel of Grozny, Inside Cheyna
Stefan Zweig: Fantastic Night and other short stories

I have Seierstad's two previous books, one about Serbia (if I remember correctly) and Afghanistan. And I keep meaning to return to Zweig, as it's been a couple of years since I read Buchmendel and The Invisible Collection. There's a press release from Pushkin Press here about a forthcoming translation of Franziska by Ernst Weiss, who was "an intimate of Zweig".

And talking of both Penguin Modern Classics and people called Ernst, I bought Ernst Jünger's Storm Of Steel during lunch, being his memoir of the First World War.

[A Common Reader]

Stewart - nice to hear of someone else who doesn't like film tie-in editions. A book is totally spoiled for me if its got a couple of actors on the cover. Perfume is another book which doesn't translate to film all that well, although the film is good in its own right (I think its perfectly acceptable for a film to be seen as a quite separate creation "based on" a book, and don't quite understand the outrage of readers who find, for example, that the ending isn't quite the same - e.g. Captain Corelli).

I came to Perfume expecting to find crime novel, or a thriller, about a serial killer. Instead I found a beautifully written and deeply researched novel about a young Frenchman with an unusual sense of smell and a unique gift for the art of the perfumier. In fact, the murders of young girls, so emphasised in the film, take second place to the descriptions of how perfume is made, and the way in which Grenouille gradually infiltrates the profession.

The Ernst Weiss book looks good. Alas, my TBR list getting out of hand again!