World Books
World Books Review: The Early Doom and Gloom of a Spanish Genius
In this story collection mostly made up of tales written early in his career, Spain’s greatest living author, Javier Marías, wears his influences, particularly Jorge Luis Borges, on his sleeve.
World Books Review: Life Under Mao
Bi Feiyu’s satiric novel about village life during the Cultural Revolution is uneven, but he displays an uncanny understanding of young women and the way they use their sexuality to try to take control of their lives.
World Books Review: A Welcome ‘Return’ to Form
What’s impressive about the thirteen stories in this volume is the coherence of Roberto Bolaño’s vision. Though the tales take place in different countries and different time periods, though some are straight fiction, some are vaguely autobiographical, and some even drift towards magical realism, each new yarn feels like a chapter in a continuous narrative.
World Books Review: A Vivid ‘Denial’
Jessica Stern’s memoir is a difficult book, uncomfortable to read and even more uncomfortable to review. It is a first-hand, detailed account by a Harvard expert on international terrorism of her rape by a stranger when she was 15 years old.
World Books Review: The Mad Bad Moralist
The collection’s choice of writings by the late 18th century Teutonic bad boy Heinrich von Kleist is streamlined, yet carefully balanced, giving readers a neatly packed sampling of his necessary lunacy, narrative brilliance, and the far-reaching vision that influenced Freud, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka.
World Books Review: Mao and the Chess Master
In one of the novellas in this fine, powerful collection, acclaimed Chinese writer Ah Cheng probes chess much as the best of Western writers have. What’s more, these stories, which first appeared in the mid-1980s, changed the course of his country’s literature by challenging Maoist conformity.
World Books Review: An uneven ‘Storm’
Writers and readers are drawn to natural disasters because they create an urgency that usually makes for compelling reading. But this novel about one of the worst natural disasters in the history of The Netherlands, while it contains wonderful set pieces, is a brilliant idea that never becomes more than that — a brilliant idea.
World Books Review: Cruel Intentions
In fiction, cruelty can be exploited for its shock valve or used to make a point. These two novels, “Beside the Sea” from France, “Rien Ne Va Plus” from Greece, illustrate both choices.
World Books: Summer Reads for Adventurous Minds
Who says your brain should go on vacation during the summer? An eccentric and eclectic list of literature in translation that demands and repays close attention, on the beach or anywhere else.
World Books Review: A Turkish Delight
The latest novel (now in paperback) from Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk centers on a wealthy Istanbul man who goes against convention and chooses a life governed by passion. The book also proffers a profound depiction of Istanbul, a city whose identity is symbolized by the Bosphorus—a bridge between the Middle East and Europe, Muslim and Christian, traditional and secular. What results is an urban portrait recalling the grimness of Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg and the romanticism of Proust’s Paris.
World Books Review: An Australian Masterpiece
Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley’s celebrated Vera Wright trilogy, available here in its entirety for the first time, memorably explores the infinite intricacies of the human heart.
World Books Interview: Nino Ricci and ‘The Origin of Species’
In this ambitious and provocative novel Canadian writer Nino Ricci looks at how the ideas of Charles Darwin shape the consciousness of Alex, a graduate student in Montreal during the 1980s who is trying to use evolutionary theory to make sense of his wayward life and floundering literary studies.
World Books Review: ‘The Original of Laura”
The striking feature of Dmitri Nabokov’s edition of his father’s final unfinished novel is the wresting of authorial control, by a son, from a man whose deep obsession with control was manifest throughout his literary career.
World Books Review: Memorable ‘Ghosts of Home’
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book “Ghosts of Home” is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search, a compelling historical reconstruction of the German-Jewish Central European culture of the embattled city of Czernowitz, once known as the “Vienna of the East.”
World Books Review: ‘The Changeling’
At its best, the Japanese Nobel Laureate’s latest novel dwells on the odd intricacy of a long-running traumatized relationship, which is equal parts love, jealousy, and sexual tension.
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