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James Wood reviewing John Wray's Lowboy writes:

What is impressive about the book is its control, and its humane comprehension of radical otherness. In this regard, it ideally justifies itself, as one always hopes novels will. You can imagine replying to someone who was curious about what it’s like to be schizophrenic, “Well, start with John Wray’s novel.” Lowboy may often be lost to himself, but he is not lost to us. Wray knows how to induce and then manage a kind of epistemological schizophrenia in the reader, whereby we can inhabit Lowboy’s groundless visions and still glimpse the ground they negate.

I love traveling and spend a lot of time on the road. In every trip, no matter how short and in every city, no matter how beautiful - I visit the bookshops. Prague was no exception. People fondly recall many things after they return from a trip to Prague – after all, it is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe - but I remember the bookshops the most. There were so many of them, and so many Czech authors whose books I had struggled to find elsewhere. From Jan Neruda to Josef Barák to Jaroslav Seifert and of course, the Kafka, I returned with two bag-loads more than I left with.

Today, I will write about Too Loud a Solitude. Of all the books I picked up, this one tugged at my heart strings a little bit more than the rest. For Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude is a book which is deceiving in its simplicity, scathing in its humor and uncompromising in its honesty, but most of all, it is profound in a way that makes you think about it for a long time even after you have turned its last page.

From the very...

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I just read Albert Camus’ "The Plague" - Camus being Camus, I was ready for a slow read , but after part I (the book is divided into five parts), I could hardly put the book down. Consequently, I am done - in the literal sense of the word. But perhaps, not really. Even after starting on my next book, I feel my thoughts returning to the life and choices of the characters of The Plague.

For the uninitiated, The Plague is an account of life in Oran, a city in Algeria that finds itself, rather unexpectedly, in the middle of a deadly epidemic. The book follows the reactions of various individuals as well as the collective, as they progress through the various stages of the plague. I am not sure I would call it an existential classic, but it definitely does a phenomenal job of examining the absurdity of life, its irrationality and human reactions to anything that they have no control over.

One of the emotions that Camus paints beautifully, especially in the early stages of the plague, is the feeling of exile. The town walls have been closed and almost all means of communication have been stopped. Telegrams have...

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Daniel Green reviewing Tom Mccarthy's "Remainder" writes

For me, the most indispensable element in the aesthetic success of Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder is McCarthy's use of the novel's brain-damaged protagonist as its first-person narrator.(...)

But this emphasis on the narrator's "mind" is not quite right, although the seeming disorder of his mind (which, in my reading, at least, is actually an attempt to reassert order) is certainly pushed to the foreground of the novel he is (unwittingly) composing. We are not, as in most conventional "psychological realism," thrust "inside the narrator's head." We are thrust into his words, where we are, undeniably, caught up in the same obsessions and compulsions (...)

Emre Peker reviews one of the classic books I have stashed in my To-be-read book pile -

The Master and Margarita shows the folly of Soviet repression, but it does not stop at mere cynicism and irony. Bulgakov also illustrates that the devil might watch out for Jesus, and vice versa, i.e., there are more gray areas even in the scripture than one might ordinarily perceive.

The gripping plot surely helps with the read, but Bulgakov's genius is in the subtle theories and observations he advances throughout this page-turner, forcing a reader to think about what it all means as a grin maliciously spreads across his face.

In just 279 pages we move from post-war Manhattan to Long Island in the 1970s, and from Mary and John's first coupling to the mistimed conception of their first grandchild.

But slowly, inexorably, we are drawn in by the power of the descriptive writing, and the gradual accumulation of insights. The almost-tragedy as Mary gives birth prematurely to her fourth child on the sitting-room sofa. The disorientation of the child whose mother suddenly is not at home, her presence unnervingly absent.

The horror of the teenage Annie as she watches her friend having an abortion, the white woven polyester of the nurse's cheap uniform etched on her mind.

Review by Kate Chisholm at Telegraph

Giving an 'A+' doesn't come easy for the people at Complete Reviews. The last book that they gave a 'rating' of A+ was 1292 books ago. That was until they reviewed Lloyd Jones's "Mister Pip".

Mister Pip may appear, at first sight, to be yet another book about the redemptive power of literature and imagination, cleverly drawing parallels between an old classic and contemporary life, but it's far more than that. And, even just taken at its fundamental level as a story, it is, simply, wondrous.

The reason the novel works particularly well lies in the tone

The first sentence of "The Outsider"/"The Stranger" (from the French L’Étranger) is one of the most catching and enigmatic of the first sentences I have read, but what caught me more was the last part of the last sentence of the book.

(...) my last wish was that there sould be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.

The 'weirdness' of the sentence summarises the tone and depth of Albert Camus's novel, often classified as existential. The novel examines the life of Meursault who ends up committing a murder and is waiting to be executed. During the trial he seems to be persecuted more for not feeling sorrow that his mother has passed away recently or that he had not cried at the funeral, an entirely normal occurrence as far as Meursaulti is concerned, than for killing a man.

It is one of those classic novels that has been analysed and reviewed to death and I am not going to add to that list. "The Outsider" seems to be one of those books (like "Atlas Shrugged") that formed the staple diet of boys and girls during their growing up...

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Max Magee reviews Per Petterson's "In the Wake" at Conversational Reading

That boundary between madness and loneliness is plumbed to great effect by Petterson in In the Wake, and is heightened by the Scandanavian backdrop of icy roads and unadorned apartment blocks. The book opens with Petteron's ruminating, somewhat pathetic male protagonist Arvid Jansen regaining lucidity leaning against the door of a bookstore. Arvid is bruised and battered though he knows not why. What follows is Arvid's slow steps toward awareness and a tentative investigation of memory.

Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College has an interesting article At The Chronicle on Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" on the occasion of its 40th birthday this year in which he muses on how, for him, the book's value has changed over the years.

My own relationship with the book has changed over time. I first read it in my teens and was transformed. It was the late 70s, and García Márquez's impact was being hailed: He had reinvented Latin America through his pen, infusing the region with magnetism. (...) As I matured, I remained in awe of García Márquez but didn't want to feel stifled under his shadow. Many writers of my generation, the so-called Latin American literary boom, were from urban centers and didn't empathize with his worldview. (...) In my 40s, I've returned to García Márquez's masterpiece. Now it seems to me that, like Cervantes's Don Quixote, it decodes the DNA of Hispanic civilization. It's a "total" novel, designed by a demiurge capable of creating a universe as comprehensive as ours.