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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...

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.

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...

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.

Everyman is a rather depressing narrative about an old man coming face to face with his physical vulnerabilities and eventually, his own mortality. The book opens with a funeral scene at a run-down Jewish cemetery, where the protagonist's family is gathered for his funeral. The beginning sets the tone for the rest of the book. At times, it seems to be a never ending narrative of someone's predictably uninteresting medical history. There is not much that even the best of writers can do to make hernia followed by appendicitis followed by carotid artery surgery and angioplasty and six stents interesting. At other times, it is his attempts to come to terms with the life he had lived, for the decisions he made, for the family he could have had.

Perhaps, this is where I let my own personal judgment cloud the literary appreciation of the book, but I just couldn't identify with the protagonist enough to appreciate his worries, anxieties and vulnerabilities. A womanizer who leaves his first wife and two resentful sons for a woman, who by his own admission, was his perfect companion, whom he leaves again to marry a Danish model nearly 20 years his junior,...

Two reviews of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union over at The Guardian. In the first Jenny Diski, describing the novel as "ecstatically smart and sassy" writes

Chabon is a spectacular writer. He does a witty turn reinventing Yiddish for the modern Alaskan Jews - of course the lingua franca of Jews without an Israel - just a little of which I, with only faintly remembered childhood Yiddish, could grasp. (...) Nothing is described as just the way it is. Nothing is let be. He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it.

In the second review, Adam Mars-Jones finds the book "a brilliantly written fantasy with a not-quite-fatal flaw at its heart."

The real problem with the book is the piecemeal way Chabon introduces his alternate reality. It's an unwritten rule of the genre (well, it's written now) that you should be able to define the difference between the parallel world and ours in a single sentence.(...) Readers can't hope to be absorbed into the delicious texture of the writing if they're subconsciously waiting for...