This is a sad book, a beautiful book. It’s about the death of a father – the death of the narrator’s father, the death also of Georgi Gospodinov’s father. (As so often in his work, Gospodinov is both participant and observer.) Death and the Gardener is enquiring about the human condition; it’s wise, it’s lyrical; […]| European Literature Network
‘That night, he had no idea he was walking over a cemetery. A secret cemetery with no gravestones or crosses, and only two dead bodies. There would be three by the time he left.’ These are the opening lines of a compulsive novel, the first translated into English by Spanish author Rosa Ribas, which maintains […]| European Literature Network
In Irene Solà’s fantastical third novel, animals reign supreme. From the woods that surround the remote Catalonian farmhouse where old Bernadeta with her ‘lizard lids’ lies dying, they come to stalk the pages: wolves, owls, foxes, spiders. The house, too, is a creature, with an ‘entrance … damp and dark, like a throat’ and ‘a […]| European Literature Network
Jérôme Prieur’s Zombie Proust, translated from the original Proust fantôme (2001) by Nancy Kline and published by Les Fugitives, reanimates the enigma of one of modern literature’s totemic figures, Marcel Proust. Habitually read as a roman à clef, À la recherche du temps perdu tantalises Prieur as an exhaustive examination of one man’s mind, with the biographer ‘descend[ing] 20,000 leagues beneath the sea’ to plumb its great depths. But no matter what depths are dived, ‘the v...| European Literature Network
