A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
It does make me feel good to have read someone before they got an award like the International Booker, someone I liked. I can convince myself that I might know a little.
Time Shelter is Gospodinov’s third novel involving
the character of Gaustine, a time-travelling flaneur, whose
prescription of past memories as relief for the unhappiness of
Alzheimer’s disease opens a Pandora’s box of weaponised nostalgia. “The
past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which
you just imagined,” writes his narrator. Literature is to blame for
everything, he and Gaustine decide – and in the case of Brexit it’s the
fault of Robinson Crusoe: “I’ll be fine on my own, Robinson declares,
God is with me. We’ll be fine on our own, his descendants say, God save
the queen (but even without her we’ll be fine).”
Before
long, every European nation is copying “Great Brexitania”, with
referendums to decide to which eras they want to return. Sweden chooses
the 1970s, the expansionist decade of Abba and Ikea; most of central
Europe opts for the hopefulness of the late 1980s, when regime change
was in the air; Bulgaria, split between late socialism and a
semi-mythical age of heroes, settles for a mashup in which “men in
breeches lay down next to women with shellacked hairdos”.
Over here, I think we'd call it speculative fiction. What attracted me to the Central and Eastern European writers was that they feel to me to be on the margins of literary Europe. I feel the Midwest is on the margins of literary America. They have a literary tradition, so does the Midwest. And they were doing interesting things with their stories when I felt constrained by what models I had to work with.
Time Shelter is Gospodinov’s fourth book to be
translated into English. It concerns the opening of a “clinic for the
past” that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each
floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, with everything from
furniture, cigarettes and drinks from the era, to newspapers that cover
each day of the decade. As word spreads, healthy people begin to seek
refuge in the clinic to escape the horrors of modern life.
Slimani said the novel “questions the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity and our intimate narrative.
“But
it is also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future,
where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison,” she continued.
“It offers us a perspective on the destiny of countries like Bulgaria, which have found themselves at the heart of the ideological conflict between the west and the communist world.”
So, go find his books, read them. Prove me wrong, that they have nothing to say to us.
Who is Georgi Gospodinov? He is a Bulgarian writer who I read in prison. First, there was a short story in Best European Fiction 2010 (it was a leisure library discard, if my memory is correct) and then his Natural Novel (thanks to the interlibrary loan program). I found him worth reading - he writes well, his stories held up.
Time Shelter is Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s third novel, and for all its focus on the apparently bygone, it could not be more timely. A mysterious therapist, Gaustine, founds a clinic that treats patients with Alzheimer’s by recreating the pasts in which they felt most secure. The “past-clinic” begins with different rooms and floors, decorated with a completist’s precision and an obsessive’s eye for detail: particular cigarette brands, lampshades, wallpaper, archive magazines … Decade by decade, therapeutic time-shelters allow patients to inhabit their temporal “safe spaces”.
***
This novel could have been a clever, high-concept intellectual game with little by way of emotional investment, but Gospodinov is a writer of great warmth as well as skill. His narrator bears close relation to Gospodinov himself: a Bulgarian, born in 1968, for whom the end of communism remains, as it remains in a ghostly way in this novel, a meeting point of past and present. His affection for that period is sincere but also without illusion. He can draw out fully dimensional characters from the broken details of their fractured memories. His transitions – between humour and sadness, absurd situationism and reverberating tragedy, pathos and ironic observation – are never obtrusive. Thanks to the skill and delicacy of Angela Rodel’s translation, these qualities are in abundant display for the anglophone reader.
The review makes a point that we all might want to keep in mind:
...Nostalgia used to feel like a source of harmless escape, and occasional sustenance. It is starting to seem like a fossil fuel, foreshortening our future as it burns.
I have read Americans do not, will not, read translations. Try this guy. He will surprise you.
Such systems could be weaponized by bad actors to
purposely spread misinformation at a large scale, said Gordon Crovitz
and Steven Brill, co-CEOs of NewsGuard. This is particularly concerning
in high-stakes news events, as we have already seen with intentional manipulation of information in the Russia-Ukraine war.
“You
have malign actors who can generate false narratives and then use the
system as a force multiplier to disseminate that at scale,” Crovitz
said. “There are people who say the dangers of AI are being overstated,
but in the world of news information it is having a staggering impact.”
Recent examples have ranged from the more benign, like the viral AI-generated image
of the Pope wearing a “swagged-out jacket”, to fakes with potentially
more dire consequences, like an AI-generated video of the Ukrainian
president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, announcing a surrender in April 2022.
“Misinformation
is the individual [AI] harm that has the most potential and highest
risk in terms of larger-scale potential harms,” said Rebecca Finlay, of
the Partnership on AI. “The question emerging is: how do we create an
ecosystem where we are able to understand what is true? How do we
authenticate what we see online?”
Ottessa Moshfegh was one of those writers I had heard of and did not get a chance to read until prison. I read Eileen there. I think there may be something in her that may be more important than the hype, but I have not read enough. The Guardian's interview, Ottessa Moshfegh: ‘I’m not brainstorming ways to freak people out’, reinforces my hope. Two items caught my eye; you may find more in the interview relevant to you.
Some critics say you’re just out to shock. Why is that considered so cheap? It’s really hard to shock people; every human emotion has been exploited by media. Yeah, I use elements of horror. But I’m not brainstorming ways to freak people out. If I wanted to shock, I wouldn’t write Lapvona. It’s my most personal book. Eileen was manipulative, because I was working in a genre where I could put people to sleep with the music of this writing and then try to deliver the excitement [of a twist]. But Lapvona was not ... like, my God, the world is violent. Why should fiction pretend it’s not?
###
Name a writer who first inspired you. Something in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, about it being best to go to museums when you’re really hungry, might be the first time a book resonated with me as a kid. I was like, oh, I get that, I totally get that; I want to be alive like that and try to get the most out of art.
One of the “big issues” that all of Gospodinov’s work, and particularly Time Shelter,
deals with is the past—namely “the dangers of the past, and the danger
that comes with nostalgia for the past.” The impetus for this latest
novel were the events of 2016, “a time when there was a glitch in time,
and things really shifted.” Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, his
inquiry into nostalgia has grown all the more urgent: “This war is a war
for the past,” he says. In his experience, Eastern European writers in
particular “understand very quickly this obsession that dictators have
with the past—because every war brings the world back into the past.”
###
As for Gospodinov, he appreciates that the Booker celebrates nuance,
artistry, and complexity in the literature it recognizes. To him, the
award is “not just a recognition of the importance of the themes in Time Shelter but
also of the style, the poetry, the complexity of the book—because it is
a complex book.” He finds the Award’s mission to be especially
important “in this time of reduction, especially in the media, when
everything’s reduced to the simplest message.”
“We shouldn’t give in,” he says. “We want to continue reading complex literature.”
I know not a single Taylor Swift song, so I might have missed all the points in Taylor Swift Answers Walt Whitman’s Questions by Dani Bostick from McSweeney's. I still think the idea is a fun one.
I probably should a longer post on Rebecca F Kuang rejects idea authors should not write about other races from The Guardian, but I am out of time this morning. I know how little I know, that I have had only story published, but it seems to me who does the writing but what is written that is important. I would have no idea how to write a Chinese character, there are none in my sights, not knowing any means I do not how they think or feel, and so I would not. To presume to know what one does not know feels like the road to stereotypes.
The author of Babel and The Poppy War, Rebecca F
Kuang, has said she finds the idea that authors should only write about
characters of their own race “deeply frustrating and pretty illogical”.
Speaking at the Hay festival,
the author, who was born in China but moved to the US when she was
four, said that there is a “really weird kind of identity politics going
on in American publishing”. She is “sympathetic” to an extent, as it is
coming from “decades of frustration of seeing the same racist,
uncritical, under-researched, shallow stereotypes”.
The
problem is, Kuang thinks, is that this has now “spiralled into this
really strict and reductive understanding of race”. As a result, a
movement that began as a call for more authentic stories about
marginalised communities “gets flipped around and weaponised against the
marginalised writers to pigeonhole them into telling only certain kinds
of stories”.
I suspect minority writers know more, can write more, about the majority culture than I could about minority cultures.
Two Errol Flynn movies later, I need to quit. Laundry needs done, which means going down to get laundry detergent. My first bout of exercise.
[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 6/18/2025]
I need to get books read. The unit manager sicced his bully boy onto our unit. Allegedly, most prominently, because we have been ranking between 4 and 6 in inspections for most of this year. He also mentioned the disappearing shower nozzles and the guys (all sex offenders) driven out of their rooms (except for counts and sleeping). That one of the counselors was removed - allegedly for introducing contraband - got a mention that was more an announcement, but never was any explicit connection made with the increased inspections (I did that). After all, the meal rotation inspections have no apparent rationality, or we would not be second this week. The inspection that put us into second place occurred before the enhanced inspections. One more reason for calling this place Franz Kafka land. Also, the unit manager's promise to do something about the black mold and the dripping water pipes remain unfulfilled. These inspections have as much to do with meal rotation standing as I have any longer with polite society.
But I got three pillows to hide. I have two extra blankets. I got the Norton's Anthology of English Literature and volume one of Shelby Foote's Civil War history, on which I perch my CPAP machine. I put them into the locker, along with pillows and one of my blankets. I must get room, and that means the books must go. Which, for me, means reading them, not discarding them
And I had a rather bad bout of depression. Joel C. read over "Mike Devlin's Homecoming". He spotted one problem I had seen - it is not quite as much a standalone storey as I think they all ought to be. He also pointed out a flaw I did not see. I wanted Devlin to be a hope for others. This hope was to be an illusion. I see this installment's overt theme to be illusions. Devlin has his illusions: his independence from nostalgia, that he can go back to his pre-prison life, that he has time to accomplish his goals, that his son will appreciate the father's absence, and all he needs for success is will power. The other main characters have their illusions about Devlin. The problem Joel saw was I had not given the reader enough reason to believe in their hopes/illusions. That I already killed Mike Devlin influenced me. From that flaw, I think I found another with pacing. I put a lot into this. I also had a problem with obsessional behavior.
Depression started creeping in with my questioning if I have any talent for writing. I know I am doing something. Then I ponder just how good is my judgment now. I will myself to patience, for feedback from outside of this place. I tell myself it takes me four drafts to get over my laziness of mind. This was the third draft.
It did not help T2 that last evening hung up the telephone rather than take my call. More about that later.
I will make Devlin think of his life as empty as mine has been. It may be another illusion. He will continue. I came up with this phrase: To not be a Captain Ahab without a Pequod.
Draft four awaits typing paper. Actually going to work on draft 3.5 longhand. We have been out of copying/typing paper for about a week now. The guys running the gambling here went wild, copying their betting slips. This does give me time to read.
I finished Best European Fiction 2010 (edited by Aleksander Hemon; Dalkey Archive Press, 2010) last night. I feel pummeled by the experience. Yet it made me want to get back to writing by telling me how far I had gotten off the path when I turned down TJ's offer to let me write. Yet, I cannot put my finger what exactly moved me.
Then come the stories I think of as fantasy without the satire. The story is a character in David Albahari's "The Basilica in Lyon." The Faust story makes an appearance in Julian Rio's "Revelation on the Boulevard of Crimes" and the Messiah in George Konrad's "Jeremiah's Terrible Tale". What I will call magic realism appears in Valter Hugo Mae's "dona malva and senhor jose ferreiro" (ghosts) and Orna Ni Choileain's "Camino" (a seer) without stilting the storytelling. Not that I have found any use, but in a story already written. Yet, it gives me ideas.
I suggest reading the biographies and writer statements in a book like this. Here I got ideas, here I got inspiration, and here is where I saw how far I got away from my dreams of writing. TJ and my oldest sister condemned me at different times of being against dreams. I recall being deflated, taken aback by both accusations. I never meant to be so critical, such a realist. No one has asked me what dreams I had or might have. Maybe I dreamt too largely. Maybe I never expected, never wanted, to live so long. I was far too superficial because I thought I had no time. But I do not remember anyone telling me they really wanted me to stick around. Not you, TJ. Not you T2. Nobody came back to get me. I had to get sent to prison before my dreams about writing could bear any fruit.
I need to write honestly about what I know. The Europeans got this idea through my head. Then I must write well. This was also beaten into my head. I may not pull off a story like Jon Fosse's "Waves or Stone", but I can try. I thank all of them who I forgot to mention.
I move onto Michael Z. Lewin's Out of Season (William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984) Thirty years old, it came out that year of Phyllis and Michele Moon and an angry TJ; of leaving Muncie and starting law school; of hopes remaining. I recognize the Indianapolis of this novel - even if I had no idea of gay bars in Indianapolis. That would LAH telling me of them. I wonder if Lewin still lives. Is he in print? This is not the first of his books I have read. I liked the fellow. I will have to make my mind up about how I like him. I go on towards a less crowded locker.
I slept in today. Probably not a good idea now, but at 6 AM I just did not feel like doing anything. Certainly, not anything that took energy.
Now at 10:20, having been doing for about 2 hours, and thinking more rain may be doming, it may be that I was wrong, even if I feel like I accomplished something. The laundry needs to be done, and I will need to walk over to the laundromat. Not likely if it rains.
Last night, we had a very violent thunderstorm pass through Muncie. The lights dimmed here.
I am going to run and gun with this morning's crop. At the moment, it is like twilight here.
More sex please, we’re bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel (The Guardian) has interesting ideas. I am neither a fan of identity politics nor porn (probably the greatest irony of my life since 2009). Long ago I read something about The Kama Sutra and Americans, along the lines that Americans think of sex as mechanics; The Kama Sutra not being an instruction manual causes confusion with Americans; and that sex is mechanics reinforced a prejudice against writing about it that I picked up from Gore Vidal. I have never understood the interest in watching porn flicks, any more than I want to watch a video on rebuilding a car engine. Sex is good for farce (the mechanics fall apart) or tragedy (the after effects, the side effects, forgotten in the midst of performing the mysterious mechanics). Passion is a wholly different thing; therein, I understand to be the root of transcendence sought through the mechanics.
Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent.
Read the whole essay, it is a bit long, as Lara Feigel surveys the books that tackle the subject.
Also, I found a way to understand D. H. Lawrence:
To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence’s wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos.....
The novel is often described as a “feminist classic”, which Sundström resists – the implication being that any political objective undermines its integrity as a novel. “Feminist books ordinarily end with a happy divorce.And this doesn’t.” Instead, Engagement is a dense, thoughtful book that takes on questions of sex, boredom, self-esteem and what Sundström calls, “the moral issue; the question of can you treat another person this way, the way Martina [treats Gustav]? At the end, she herself comes to the conclusion that you can’t, it isn’t right. She can’t go on exploiting him, because he’s helplessly in love with her.” The book is less about the experience of loving someone than about being the object of love, and given current discussions around young women “decentring men” and “heteropessimism”, it is a startlingly modern novel.
I admit that kind of relationship is beyond my experience. The interviewee describes the current generation of Swedes as less free than was her generation; I think this is true of Americans, too.
There are some cliches, and the luxurious jetsetting of the narrator grows tiresome, but the occasional slip is easily forgiven in such a warm and melancholic writer – the kind who also remarks, “I wonder whether flowers aren’t covert assistants to the dead who lie beneath them, observing the world through the periscope of their stems”. The book is endlessly quotable, and the narrator’s travel bragging is put into an empathetic context by the lack of travel allowed to Bulgarians under the Soviet regime. He tells us of his father’s one trip abroad to Finland, a reward from his agricultural collective for good work. The amount that Bulgarians are allowed to spend there is limited by the Communist party. Another man on the trip smuggles extra spending money, hiding it in hand-rolled cigarettes. In a fit of excitement over finally getting to travel, he accidentally smokes it.
The other side of the hill(Engelsberg ideas) is about military intelligence, but this seems worth repeating - and for you to think about - as having a more general, existential use.
The other, commonly understood meaning of the word intelligence is that of general, cognitive problem-solving skills. To say that someone is highly intelligent is a mark of approbation and distinction, and is a quality to be found in the best leaders and commanders in all fields of human endeavour. What all leaders are consistently attempting to do is to apply intelligence, as a cognitive skill, to ‘intelligence’ – that timely and accurate, contextualised knowledge which drives informed decision-making. As this process has become more complicated and complex, so the development of military intelligence as both a branch of the armed forces and a sophisticated military process in itself, has grown. It has become a vital, resource-intensive, military discipline that drives information collection, and then delivers considered, informed analysis, in order to provide the guidance and direction that assists commanders in their decision-making. It is intelligence that drives what is often referred to as the ‘decision-action cycle’, whereby information is turned into situational awareness that in turn allows a commander to choose a course of action from several possible options, and to give clear orders for his forces to execute.
In geographical terms, Russia’s access to the world ocean has always been compromised by maritime chokepoints (and polar ice), which leave the great bulk of its export economy, bulky products relying on shipping, or pipelines exposed to maritime interdiction, economic blockades based on international law, delivered by superior naval forces. Alfred Thayer Mahan explored this strategy through the British experience between 1660 and 1815, and it was adopted as the League of Nations’ preferred instrument to coerce aggressors in 1919. The inability of the League to execute it should not obscure the inherent power of the method.
***
Today, Russian economic activity still relies on access to the world ocean, by ship or pipeline, through two landlocked seas and an icebound northern coast. Selling oil, gas and grain at low rates may support Russian diplomacy, and maintain cash flow, but this is not a viable long-term option. Long wars, like the Anglo-Russian conflict of 1807-11, tend to favour maritime economic actors over those seeking a military solution on land – if they have the political will to persist. Turning the economic screw by legal means offers a non-kinetic means of exerting significant pressure – and detaching some of its more pliable friends.
Andrew Lambert's essay leaves China alone, while I think the same applies to China. It is why we should be so wary of China building up its fleet.
“Politics Is Conflictual”: An Interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (The Drift) raises a whole of points, but until now I had never heard of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. He raised a thought and a fear I have had for many years now: what happens when the rest of the world sees the United States as its enemy?
Coordinating any kind of federal or international response to climate change now feels like a pipe dream. Do you see any reason to hope? Where do you think that we — not only in the United States but around the world — should be directing our energies?
I see one big reason for hope. I’ve started being less shy about using that word these days. I don’t know why people are so bent out of shape about hope. Hope is great. One bright spot is that it seems as though the recession of the U.S. from global centrality has made certain kinds of internationalism more likely to succeed. Maybe most notably from the climate perspective, the International Maritime Organization passed essentially the first global carbon tax just days after the U.S. pulled out of it. I suspect it won’t be the last victory of this sort. The U.S., even by the standards of the right, is particularly intransigent under the present circumstances. It may just leave the rest of the world actually able to coordinate on what space there is for overlapping consensus on climate change. The difficult thing to explain has always been how we weren’t able to move from interest convergence to something at least approaching global cooperation, given that we all do have just the one planet. As much as we might fuss about the details, four degrees Celsius of warming will be bad for everyone. The U.S. has been a uniquely toxic actor in that space, and the isolationist tendencies of the present administration might actually work to the global advantage in the long view — if, and only if, we prevent Trump from pursuing wars and territorial expansion and global interference, like militarily occupying the Panama Canal and claiming Greenland as a colonial prize and disrupting military alliances that help forestall wars. The end result of that kind of destabilization will not be global cooperation. We can only solidify the carbon tax wins in the long term by defeating this administration. But if we do, then we might be able to make those short-term gains in climate politics permanent, and that would be good for the planet and everyone on it.
After World War II, much of the left opposed aspects of the Marshall Plan and American programs for distributing aid abroad. Now, as our foreign aid apparatus is dismantled, is there an opportunity to imagine an alternative to the system that developed? In other words, do you think the decimation of the post-1945 international order creates any productive openings?
The disintegration of the post-1945 order communicates effectively, in terms that state managers understand, the need for the kind of multilateral cooperation that was originally envisioned by Pan-Africanists and Third Worldists, the kind that’s currently being championed by groups like the Progressive International, which is calling for states in the Global South to form blocs around resource management. If, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and similar states decided to organize around the mineral resources they have, could they use that leverage over the global economic system to chart out a fairer, more equitable path of development? Maybe. Just as we were talking about on the domestic front, and just as we were talking about in terms of woke capitalism versus apartheid capitalism, the space opening up for something new is also the space opening up for something worse. The question will be: which version of a new order — or new orders, plural — will win resources and people most quickly and most effectively? And that is a question we have to answer with our organizing.
Trump's America First idea is actually screw everybody else. Unlike his female conquests, other countries will not be quietly screwed.
You’ve written about the social consequences of NAFTA. As we weather Trump’s tariffs and other economic disruptions, what social costs do you see coming alongside the financial and economic ones?
Regardless of the specifics — which are increasingly hard to calculate or even make guesses about because of the lack of commitment of the current administration to the things that it says — I can imagine both consumer and investor confidence cratering in the U.S. Downstream of that are a lot of bad things, economically speaking, but I imagine inequality will increase as a result, because there will likely be higher prices for many goods. There will be more uncertainty about the economic future, and that generally tends to tilt things in the direction of the people who are able to save and moderate their decision-making. I think people will feel a lot more vulnerable to the people around them, and a lot more vulnerable in personal relationships. People will leave bad relationships less often. People will leave parts of the country that are bad for them, or people like them, less often. I think you’re going to see a lot of cultural conservatism in the sense of people living less exploratory lives, taking fewer chances, and resigning themselves to levels of abuse and worse working conditions than they might have otherwise. And I think this is the design. Those kinds of interpersonal vulnerabilities, even more than the economic benefits of selling our Social Security numbers to Russia or whatever, is the kind of domination the people in our government crave.
Now, from The Guardian:
High home prices don’t just affect millennial buyers. William Pollard Jr, 71, said he and his wife have been wanting to move out of Florida to live closer to family, but prices have been too high to buy a new home.
“With the stock and bond markets bouncing everywhere, we cannot put together an account to buy a house elsewhere. The markets need to be stable, so we can build more wealth,” Pollard said. “I am very frustrated at having to put a major goal on hold for who knows how long … I am getting no younger. We want to live the rest of our years near family and friends.”
But, due to state and federal budget cuts, including 16 layoffs at the Indiana State Library, some local historians say residents could see fewer of these markers around the city and state. And that means important stories will go untold, Bates said.
“The damage is going to be a lot more costly. What I mean by that is people don’t know these historical narratives,” Bates said. “So without those markers, stories like (John Tucker) would not get told. And maybe that’s their point, is that they don’t want these stories being told.”
History, literature, poetry, the art of novel writing coming together in one interview:
Jung's map of the soul (Engelsberg ideas) is probably too slight for what I wanted - an understanding of Jung - but this contains something that will tickle my imagination:
In his book Man and His Symbols, Jung wrote, ‘as scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized’. He explained: ‘Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightening his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.’
Survival food:
Lunch is finished. I should walk down to the convenience store. I will rest instead.
Try The Modern Literary Novel site here with its emphasis on the translated novel. The site describes itself as follows:
The purpose of this site is to give an idiosyncratic view of modern (i.e. more or less 20th/21st century) literature, as represented by the novel. It is biased towards my taste and towards the English-speaking world and Europe. You will find very little reference to short stories, drama, poetry and other literary forms, not because I do not consider them worthwhile but because I have less interest in and knowledge of them.
Most, though certainly not all, the books mentioned here have been published in English, though many are now sadly out-of-print. This site is strictly non-academic. I am not and have never been an academic and have aimed it at the intelligent reader who reads modern literature for pleasure.
Among the Japanese writers are Kenzaburo Oe, and Haruki Murakami, whom I have read. There is a very enlightening review of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore - a novel I have read and impressed by and for which my notes will probably appear in the future - and Killing Commendatore - and his view is similar to hmine (mine was negative and will also to appear here in the future). With Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter there is pretty much a plot summary compared to what he does with the Murakami books.
...In the end… What? He sits in his battered and much repaired rocking chair. He becomes a tramp and his old friends don’t recognise him any more. In the end, nothing. This is not a realist novel so, while it can have multiple beginnings, it really does not need a conventional end. It is very well done and very well written. If this does not kill the realist novel, nothing will.
