Tag: translated
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The Vegetarian by Han Kang, tr. by Deborah Smith
This is a beast of a book about trauma, families and personal agency. It’s haunted me for weeks since I’ve finished it.
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The Liar by Martin Hansen
I didn’t get Martin Hansen’s The Liar. It’s a close read, a subtle and low-key novel that I just didn’t fully engage with
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The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
The Hour of the Star is a short book but it was unusual enough that I’ll seek out more by Clarice Lispector
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The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati
The Stronghold is culturally important and you could build a university course around it. It’s also simply a beautiful and unforgettable book.
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Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
It took a bunch of extracurricular work, but I managed to make sense of this thing. Calvino is an author that has been on my radar as a challenge. When I saw a couple of his books for cheap at the used bookshop, I couldn’t resist. It wasn’t a difficult read, in the sense that…
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Counterweight by Djuna
This book was all over the various places I read about books, to the point that I felt left out for not knowing about this mysterious Djuna character (only then to find out that this is their first book published in English). The Book Marks reviews are all ‘rave’s, but on clickthrough the praise is…
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We by Yevgeny Zemyatin
It’s surprising how long a shadow this book casts. I haven’t read 1984 or Anthem in a long time but both of them came back to me clearly while reading this. And it feels a lot less like homework than Brave New World. It’s also much more interesting coming from the perspective of a Russian…
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Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann
Like East if Eden, this was a book I reluctantly picked up, then couldn’t put down. It took a while to get into – a cast of thousands and a million details, but it eventually gets laser-focused on certain characters and dissects events in incredible depth. The writing is so immersive I would be reading for…