World Books Review: Tom McCarthy’s C

Catastrophic, consummate, and above all, cryptic
For all of the faults of this novel, which is on the shortlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, one can’t help but keep turning the pages. Author Tom McCarthy explores a darkness that is unpleasant, tedious, and disturbing, but also timely and fascinating. >>Read Tommy Wallach’s review

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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World Books Review: Diary of Some Bad Years

One of literature’s greatest living authors, J. M. Coetzee, writes his own posthumous fictionalized biography, in which he airs his deepest fears that no number of awards or marriages or friends can ever fully dispel the universal human certitude that one is a talentless fraud and an unlovable misanthrope.

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World Books Review: Perils of the Pansexual

This novel about a young woman who wakes up to find that her big toe has become a penis was a major bestseller in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. The book is titillating, disturbing without being disgusting, and reads like a self-help guide on the subjects of sex and love.

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World Books Review: Crime and Punishment “As God Commands”

Niccolò Ammaniti, the internationally best-selling author of “I’m Not Scared,” comes up with another compelling tale of gritty crime and desperate punishment, this time revolving around a father and son facing a variety of demons.

World Books Review: Of Violence and Beauty

Colombian author Evelio Rosero has been writing about the miseries of his homeland for three decades now. His novels, many of which take on the internecine wars, kidnappings, murders, and political upheavals of his country, have won numerous awards (including, humorously enough, the National Literature Prize from the Colombian Ministry of Culture). His work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and “The Armies,” which won 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is no exception.

World Books Review: Start Making Sense

The prolific Yoko Tawada has a considerable reputation in Europe: her writing — novels, plays, poems, essays, and short stories — has garnered a number of awards, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Goethe Medal.

World Books Review: Fallout Girl

“Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol the dingy city. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m shaped to it, like a hand that’s been carrying buckets in the cold.” So begins author Marcel Theroux’s “Far North,” a novel of post-apocalypse set in Siberia. It’s an interesting geographic choice for this kind of story, as Siberia is one of the few places in the world that already looks as desolate and ravaged as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Theroux, who has both spent time on the Great Steppe, and also filmed a documentary on settlers who have chosen to move back to Chernobyl, does a remarkable job evoking the breath-freezing cold of that world, giving even the novel’s most implausible ideas the ring of truth.

World Books Review: The Old Maid’s Tale

All great anti-utopian novels focus on a disturbing aspect of the present, pushing it to its most horrific conclusions. In “1984,” it’s the panoptic police state. In “Brave New World,” the sexualization and Americanization of England. In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the subjugation of women through the sanctification of childbirth. In Ninni Holmqvist’s “The Unit,” the issue in question is the way the childless, especially the childless elderly, are looked down upon as irrelevant.