Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima

In her famous essay Mishima ou la vision du vide Marguerite Yourcenar compares the Japanese novelist with a Samurai who opposes in his mind two seminal ideas: the sinister ease of dying against the heroic struggle of living. The intrinsic sense of a dichotomy that has been present in Japan throughout its history and is…

Operation Shylock: A Confession

It is not uncommon for a writer to refer to the other person inside that does the job, a double who sits still at the desk, and is capable of producing what later will be called a work of fiction. It is not rare to read confessions about that certain other that is capable of…

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

A farm owned by Larry Cook, the patriarch of a family that for generations has cultivated the land and can proudly claim that its one thousand acres make it one of the biggest in Zebulon County, a farmer’s community in Iowa, where “acreage and financing were facts as basic as name and gender”, is at…

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

When a book opens with a list of characters similar to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and we quickly browse through its seven hundred pages, we can easily get its scope and what it wishes to achieve. And as we begin reading, a dead man’s opening lines in the Prologue are somehow prophetic to what we…

White Noise by Don DeLillo

For Don DeLillo writing is a concentrated form of thinking. The son of Italian immigrants, he grew up in the Bronx. White Noise is his eighth novel, published in 1985 for which he earned the National Book Award for Fiction. The work represents a major turning point in his career. Thanks to it, he became…

The Only Story by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes’ thirteenth novel is a reflection on love as seen by its narrator, who at the end of his life is absolutely sure that we all have only one story to tell. There are parallels between The Only Story and his earlier novel The Sense of an Ending: both are love stories, and both…

Of memory as salvation: Anthony Marra

Every serious reader keeps track of how books pile up before and after being read. To the left, a never-ending mountain of those waiting to be discovered, to the right those already finished. Some even have lists of suggestions, books reviewed in journals, newspapers, blogs; and it is quite common to feel frustration as the…