A white American woman reaches a dead end in her life situation, so she moves to Malta with her teenage son. There, Maltese people serve as a backdrop of inscrutable, amoral Others through whom she attempts to clarify her direction in life. The opening was promising ... Read this only because it's set in Malta.
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A reviewed On the island at the center of the center of the world by Elizabeth Kadetsky (Small Press Distribution)
Heart of Darkness vibes
2 stars
A white American woman reaches a dead end in her life situation, so she moves to Malta with her teenage son. There, Maltese people serve as a backdrop of inscrutable, amoral Others through whom she attempts to clarify her direction in life. The opening was promising ... Read this only because it's set in Malta.
A reviewed The Employees by Olga Ravn
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously …
The Employees
4 stars
Intriguing speculative fiction in the form of a series of testimonies by workers on a ship -- some of whom are human and some of whom are androids. It also feels like a museum exhibition catalog if it were written by museum workers who haven't been told anything about the exhibition. In its relatively few pages, Ravn manages to limn the boundaries between subject/object, animacy/inanimacy, and sensation, emotion, and perception.
Intriguing speculative fiction in the form of a series of testimonies by workers on a ship -- some of whom are human and some of whom are androids. It also feels like a museum exhibition catalog if it were written by museum workers who haven't been told anything about the exhibition. In its relatively few pages, Ravn manages to limn the boundaries between subject/object, animacy/inanimacy, and sensation, emotion, and perception.
A reviewed Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark
Territorial Rights
3 stars
Read this because it's set in Venice and I'd never read Muriel Spark. It is a late Cold War satirical comedy of manners. Feels pretty dated and of niche interest.
Read this because it's set in Venice and I'd never read Muriel Spark. It is a late Cold War satirical comedy of manners. Feels pretty dated and of niche interest.
A rated Venice for Lovers (Armchair Traveller): 3 stars
Venice for Lovers (Armchair Traveller) by Louis Begley
Every year for each of the thirty they have been married, Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein have escaped to Venice …
A rated Territorial Rights: 3 stars
A rated The Employees: 4 stars
The Employees by Olga Ravn
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare. Aboard the …
A rated If Venice Dies: 4 stars
A rated The Promise: 4 stars
The Promise by Silvina Ocampo, Suzanne Jill Levine, Jessica Powell, and 1 other
A rated The Hunter: a Novel: 2 stars
The Hunter: a Novel by Tana French
It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them …
Umami by Laia Jufresa
Deep in the heart of Mexico City, where five houses cluster around a sun-drenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old …
A rated A Private Life: 4 stars
A Private Life by Chen, Ran (Weatherhead Books on Asia)
At the age of twenty-six, Ni Niuniu has come to accept pain and loss. She has suffered the death of …
A rated Clean Air and Good Jobs: 4 stars
A reviewed Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks
Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s …
Maud Martha
5 stars
A perfect, sadly underread classic, like just about every mid-century novel by a US Black woman writer. All the semi-realized and failed promises of freedom in the postwar US as told in crisp prose through the aspirations and disappointments of one Black woman's life.
A perfect, sadly underread classic, like just about every mid-century novel by a US Black woman writer. All the semi-realized and failed promises of freedom in the postwar US as told in crisp prose through the aspirations and disappointments of one Black woman's life.
A reviewed Banyan Moon by Thao Thai
Banyan Moon
This novel is kind of cheesy, but I enjoyed the mother-daughter, immigration story drama. Read in one sitting.