Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Despite one’s aspirations to another kind of reality, for Pierre Reverdy one is forced to return to one’s fetters.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:03AMThursday, January 26, 2017
It would be a mistake to call the absorbing Eve out of her Ruins a mystery novel.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:48AMTuesday, November 8, 2016
A perspicacious, multifarious, and compelling fictional field report on how we get hitched or unhitched, coupled or uncoupled.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:18PMWednesday, October 12, 2016
Scholastique Mukasonga’s autobiography, Cockroaches, examines the three decades leading up to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga. Translated from the French…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:51AMWednesday, September 28, 2016
France: Story of a Childhood is half personal essay, half autobiographical novel.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:46AMWednesday, September 7, 2016
An absorbing and disturbing novel that explores the dangerous turns that erotomania can take.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:50AMMonday, June 13, 2016
Did Marguerite Duras, who had worked in the French résistance during the war, feel guilty about not having been sufficiently concerned about the Shoah?
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:21PMTuesday, June 7, 2016
The author makes fully human an illness marked by absence and estrangement from humanity.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:06AMThursday, April 21, 2016
One reads this strangely engaging book, like Volodine's others, with a sort of knitted-brow amusement.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:04AMMonday, April 11, 2016
Audin scrutinizes political commitment when it is undertaken by representatives of an intellectual discipline detached from the real world.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:02AMFriday, April 1, 2016
An extraordinary book that should be in the hands of every lover of the French capital. And don’t we all love Paris?
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:14PMFriday, March 25, 2016
This invigorating book formulates a caveat: beware of music..
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:48PMSunday, January 31, 2016
In "Les Diaboliques" readers must expect quite a lot of crime and some misogyny as well.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 06:27PMWednesday, January 27, 2016
Whenever there is a choice to be made between meaning and melody, the translator tends to opt for the latter.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:12AMWednesday, December 23, 2015
In contrast to similar extermination-camp memoirs, But You Did Not Come Back focuses on the affliction of women.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:24AMFriday, October 2, 2015
Tram 83 mirrors the most sordid and chaotic features of contemporary African cities, in which non-Africans also remain intimately and often deviously involved.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:12AMTuesday, September 8, 2015
Antoine Volodine is a master of the prolonged, very prolonged, tongue-in-cheek spoof. But he is also dead serious.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:46AMFriday, August 28, 2015
The Bloody Hand stands alongside other autobiographical classics devoted to the First World War.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:46AMWednesday, July 15, 2015
Garréta pulls off a stylistic feat: it is impossible to determine the gender of the two main characters.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:06AMTuesday, June 16, 2015
Poet Klaus Merz wields his deceptively simple diction in order to pry open hidden secrets: what we leave unsaid, what we neglect, avoid.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:27AMMonday, June 8, 2015
This study is an attempt to “enter” a foreign way of thought and to study the “possibilities” and, by extension, “potential mindsets” of the human mind.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:01PMTuesday, April 7, 2015
Pascal Garnier’s characters slip through cracks, cross borders, pass through the thin mirrors of the self, and commit irreparable acts.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:28AMSaturday, March 21, 2015
French writer Pascal Quignard strives to peer beyond, or behind, what psychoanalysts typically rationalize as the primal parental realities.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:24AMWednesday, March 11, 2015
Like James Baldwin, Alain Mabanckou is striving to see beyond comforting or righteous notions and grasp a world full of movement, migration, diversity, and unexpected mixtures.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:03AMFriday, March 6, 2015
Looking deeply into things and, by no means least of all, into other human beings implies meditating on brevity, on ephemerality—and this is what Tone Škrjanec does in this book.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:24PMFriday, February 27, 2015
Sometimes called the “Turkish Balzac” and, more often, the “Turkish Chekhov,” Sait Faik actually had a literary vision all his own.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:22PMFriday, January 30, 2015
Tsvetanka Elenkova is one of the key figures in contemporary Bulgarian poetry.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:52AMMonday, January 26, 2015
Very little happens in Dominique Fabre's books, yet one keeps on reading. because he so genuinely depicts the ordinary lives that most of us lead.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 06:09PMThursday, January 8, 2015
Valuable new translations of Aimé Césaire imply that we have overemphasized the political dimension of his poetry and overlooked other, purely literary, qualities.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:34AMMonday, December 29, 2014
The success of this short novel set in Japan lies in the empathy it creates for a pair of ordinary and lonely characters.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 09:30AMSunday, November 30, 2014
Philippe Rahmy is afflicted with brittle-bone disease: in his superb writing, he takes off from his incurable inherited condition and ventures out courageously.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:08PM 
