Search results

Posted a review of this novella in my blog: .......................... In a 2014 interview António Lobo Antunes explained why his novels revolutionized Portuguese fiction in the 1970s. “At the time the plots were distant things, countries from Antiquity, imaginary, pure fiction all of it.”...

Reviewed this novel recently for my blog: ................... I read John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor in August 2014 and enjoyed its extravagance, ribaldry and satire. But reading up on him I formed this impression that Barth had started out as a boring realist who later embarked in fabulism...

I reviewed this collection of short-stories at my blog; ----------------------------- Not long after discovering Paul West, I read Guy Davenport (1927-2005) for the first time. Essayist, translator, painter, poet and short-story writer, Davenport never became a household name, prompting John...

Paul West (b. 1930) was born in England but has been living in New York for decades now; he's married to poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman. The rest you can get in his Wiki. Mirabell reviewed his Rat Man of Paris here. I'm not sure how I heard of him; I know he's one of William H. Gass'...

I just learned that João Ubaldo Ribeiro, an author I wrote about before, passed away today. He was one of Brazil's great contemporary novelists, author of books such as Sargento Getúlio, O Feitiço da Ilha do Pavão and Viva o Povo Brasileiro, a 800-page epic novel about the history of Brazil that...

I figured it was time we started a thread for the novel instead of using the author's thread. Finished it today, and I'm impressed by Gass' talent and craftsmanship. He's a conscious builder of sentences. Each one has to be perfect; he wants each to have little effects - assonance, consonance...

I just found out at another forum that Milan Kundera published a new novel in 2013, and no one told me about it! It was published first in Italian instead of French, and it's called La Festa dell'Insignificanza. Here's the publisher's link and my translation: "To shine a light upon the most...

Just reviewed this novel for my blog: This week is devoted to Angola. We'll begin with its greatest novelist. Pepetela was born in Angola in 1941. Although of Portuguese descent, his parents had also been born in Angola. He grew up in the multiracial city of Benguela, which allowed him to...

I recently posted this on my blog: Detectives are the fools of the universe, without receiving any exemption from the dangers of uttering truths. Lumbering through a corrupt, hypocrite, violent world armed with nothing but convictions and an inflated sense of morality. What is that makes...

In 1990 ago Brazil and Portugal idealized an ortographical agreement to harmonize the spelling in both countries as well as in the Portuguese-speaking African countries. The plan was for the implementation to start taking place around 2011, to culminate in 2015 with the full transition to the...

Rubem Fonseca (b. 1925) is considered one of the best living Brazilian writers. Admired by Thomas Pynchon and Mario Vargas Llosa, in a career spanning fifty years he has written novels, short-story collections and film scripts. In 2003 he received the Camões Prize, joining the ranks of other...

I've been reading Henry Fielding's Tom Jones lately, as part of my goal to gain a wider understanding of the history and development of the novel. Needless to say that the British contributed immensely to this genre. So I'm compiling a list of authors to read: besides Fielding there's Daniel...

I couldn't find a thread for this novel, so I'm starting one. I read this novel recently and today put up a post about it on my blog, I thought I could share it with you: “I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography,” complains the male protagonist of Deception, “I write...

Wrote this for my blog recently: I’m taking a break from the José Saramago Month event because I also joined Caroline and Lizzy's German Literature Month. I figured this would be a good occasion to finally read Austrian writer Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1932). I first came across this...

I wrote this for my blog a few months ago: Knowledge of Hell (1980) is my introduction to António Lobo Antunes. It is not the first novel I read by him, but the reading of A Morte de Carlos Gardel, some time in 2007, has left but faint vestiges in my memory, which only remembers a scene about a...

I was sure we had a thread for Jorge Amado (1912-2001), one of the most popular Brazilian novelists of the 20th century, and winner of the 1994 Camões Prize. I've been thinking of him lately because 2012 is the centenary of his birth. Here in Portugal there were some celebrations, the José...

This is a post I wrote for my blog last Friday: Unfortunate circumstances darken this article. I had been labouring on an article about Portuguese poet Manuel António Pina for some days now, and yesterday I had given it the finishing touches to have it ready to post today. So it was a sad...

Manuel António Pina (1943-2012), an excellent poet, who had been publishing poetry since the early '70s, died last Friday, at the age of 68. In 2011 he had received the Camões Prize. Besides being one of the best contemporary Portuguese poets, António Pina was also the author of children's books...

I've been reading GTB's mammoth tome from 1972, in the original. Although sometimes I have trouble understanding a few words and have to look them up in the dictionary, it's been relatively easy to follow the story in the novel, which is written in rather simple language. As for the story...

One of my favourite José Saramago novels is almost out in English. Here's the first chapter, translated by Margaret Jull Costa: HERE, IT’S MOSTLY countryside, land. Whatever else may be lacking, land has never been in short supply, indeed its sheer abundance can only be explained by some...