Beyond an HDB flat
First published in 1915, Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity has been reintroduced to contemporary readers by the excellent Persephone Books, which produces out-of-print or forgotten works from the early twentieth century by female writers in its signature grey jacket. Fidelity is set in the midwestern town of Freeport in Iowa in 1913 and revolves around its protagonist,…
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I first learnt about Mo Yan / 莫言 when I was browsing books in an Eslite bookstore in Taipei. There was an entire shelf featuring his works that had been translated into English. Many of these books had “Winner of 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature” printed on the cover, lest this recognition goes unnoticed. Having made a…
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Beware of Pity is the only novel written by Stefan Zweig – who is renowned for his short stories and biographies. I had come across Stefan Zweig only earlier this year, while reading up on translated works by writers such as Antal Szerb and Sándor Márai, as well as books published by the excellent Pushkin Press.…
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Gerbrand Bakker’s “The Detour“, translated from Dutch into English by David Colmer: This is a story about a woman with a debilitating illness who has escaped from her former life in Amsterdam and retreated into a rural farmhouse, complete with an unused pigsty, geese and roaming sheep, in northern Wales. Narrated from a third-person perspective, the…
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I was home from work earlier than usual today. It was a little odd as I wasn’t quite sure with all that ‘extra’ time. ‘Extra’ because if I were to clock strict, regular hours and get off work at 1730, this would be the ‘usual’ time that I would be home. Anyway, I did the…
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Stoner was in the bag as I waited for the train at Brussels’ Gare Centrale to bring me to Amsterdam. If I didn’t know that the book is named after the protagonist, William Stoner, I might have cast it aside as being a novel about someone who is constantly stoned. While the title seems a…
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There was a brief thunderstorm last night; lightning flashes, rumbling thunder, and raindrops pelting the empty streets of Brussels. I flung wide open all the windows in my living room. I wanted to bring the smell of the rain into the apartment. Impatient, I stuck my head out of a window; it was so nice to…
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I just finished reading Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb – first published in Hungarian in 1937, translated into English by Len Rix in 2000. What an intriguing journey! I was drawn into the story from the beginning as I followed the protagonist, Mihaly on a spontaneous escapade from his bourgeois life, as well as his newly-wed…
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