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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
