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Besides novels, I also often read short pieces online. I often do this when I'm struggling to get to the end of a novel and those online pieces offer some distraction. Then, with smartphones now offering access to the internet nearly anywhere and anytime, I also often read online to kill time...

My three most recent Shazam's on Youtube: Francis

When you like the cynicism that rules The First Law trilogy, I can, only three chapters in, already say that you will probably also like this. The nice thing is that, even if they can perfectly be read as separate novels, Abercrombie's work always is interlinked to an extent. Characters, names...

Souvenirs Pieux by Marguerite Yourcenar. She was, I think, the first woman admitted to L'academie française. Souvenirs Pieux is the first part of a trilogy containing her (at least partial) autobiographical memories. As she was born in my beloved Brussels, a big chunk of these souvenirs is...

Started Red County by Joe Abercrombie yesterday... Return to trusted vestiges after the excursions into Kadare and Can Xue -territory :) Francis

I always liked the two Luc Besson movies Le Grand Bleu - The Big Blue and Leon - The Professional. The both deal with dead as one of the themes but seem to approach dead in two completely opposite ways: - Le Grand Bleu seems to approach dead as a liberation, a step into another dimension; -...

Hi all, back after a rather long break. I did however not abandon on the WLF-prize project during that break and continued reading Frontier by Can Xue in an English translation by Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping. Finished it yesterday evening actually, so it took me the best part of 2 and half...

I just started reading Frontier and have finished the first chapter so far. My first impression is that it somewhat holds the middle between a fable and a novel. The main character till this point is a young woman Luijin. Her thoughts often strike like those of a child, but then suddenly, as if...

Reading through the comments regarding Kadare so far, the sentiment that his novels are not really engaging resurfaces with several of us. In that respect, I was wondering whether this could (partially) also be the result of us reading translations of the original work? I guess none of us has...

I finished Broken April yesterday and must say that, after having read it completely, I changed my mind for the better compared to my former comments. The novel could in a nutschell be described as a long and fictionalized essay about the Kanun, a codification of Albanian customs, kind of clan...

Many thanks for opening the different threads for the authors Bartleby as well as for all the other effort you already put into this. I will post my comments on Broken April in the Kadare thread in a day or two. Cheers, Francis

I got Broken April by Kadare in an English translation as an e-book on Kindle and am just over halfway into it by now. For some reason, it reminds me of a Dutch translation of Kafka's The Castle I read as a youngster. The storyteller seems rather detached from the story he is telling and, as a...

So I finished it yesterday evening. I read the novel in the author's native language, Dutch, and thus in the language I assume it was originally written in. First comment is that, in my opinion at least, you can clearly sense that the author started out as a poet. His mastery of the language...

Started watching Bronx on Netflix this morning while having my bowl of cereals. Contrary to what the name would lead to believe, this is a French movie that plays against the drug trafficking scene in Marseille as a back-drop. Only watched the first 15 minutes but I think this will be on tonight...

I haven't Peter. I did only read the three above mentionned.

Looking forward to discover the nominees. As I have a near subconscious dislike for translations and master Albanian, Hungarian, Mandarin nor Gikuyu, I have not yet read any of them. That is good though, as here is an occassion to broaden my horizons and a challenge to overcome my dislike for...

Officially, Dutch and Flemish are one and the same language :). So that may explain that. Whether written by a Fleming or by someone from the Netherlands, the written language will thus be almost identical. There will be some small differences but they are rather the result of local custom, not...

Streuvels obviously is a writer from another era and the Flemish he uses may indeed sound very static and almost solemn compared to today's use of the language. Even young Flemish people of today would probably need to think twice about certain words or sentences used by writers of that era. In...

I started reading The Sorrow of Belgium twice. The second time I made it to the end. The thing with the Sorrow is that, in my opinion, the last third is brilliant, but you have to plough through the first 2/3rd to get there. The book is, in Flemish speaking Belgium at least, considered kind of...

Depends on which book and it's length obviously :). That being said, if through this thread, or the forum, we can establish that there would be an interest for a one or more specific older Flemish/Dutch books, the organisation behind the Flanders Literature-site could help spark interest from a...