“In his column in the Daily Telegraph, former editor Charles Moore praises Miklós Bánffy as ‘the Tolstoy of Transylvania’. Ardent Banffyites like yours truly are always pleased when the Hungarian novelist gets attention in the English-speaking world, which happens all too rarely. (…) Simply put, Bánffy is a must-read.” Reblogged text (c) andrewcusack.com, 2008
Is Angelina Jolie’s first film as a director a revival of “tribalistic” Balkan clichés – or more? On verra… The LA TIMES is quite positive in their review.
On Anna Kim’s novel Frozen Time (2010)
“Written by the South Korean-born author, who moved to Austria from Germany aged seven and regards German as her mother tongue, the narrative follows a young researcher in Vienna’s Red Cross Tracing Service as she attempts to help a Kosovan man discover what happened to his wife during the war in former Yugoslavia.” > article (c) A Year of Reading in the World, 2012 (reblogged)
> homepage Anna Kim (c) photo.
“The book Balkanmeile – 24 Stunden Ottakringer Strasse offers a portrait of a street of Vienna that has attracted attention over the last few years on account of its migrant inhabitants. Review (c) wienintenational.at, 2012
The author of The Name of the Rose on why it is human to lie, how Berlusconi has used conspiracy theories to stay in power – and Eco’s love/hate relationship with his most famous book. With a link to a review of his recent novel The Cemetery of Prague (c) THE GUARDIAN, 2011
A review of Stasiuk’s great Warsaw city & crime novel “9”
by Tom Tomaszewski (c) THE INDEPENDENT, 2008
The Story of Dragoljub Milanović: a true Handke indeed.
“This is not a sermon, but (…) a story. A story to tell, if necessary, to a woodpile or an empty snail shell or even to myself alone, by the way not for the first time –”*
Peter Handke’s narrator, the self-appointed chronicler of Dragoljub Milanović’ Story, suffers from a strangely missionary pessimism that leads him to formulate unbearably beautiful sentences like the one quoted. And if no one listens to him, he is just going to talk to his “shoelace”, the “nutcracker”, or even a “worn-out doormat.”
‘Talk to the hand,” evil tongues of Americanized origin probably would tell him, but in Continue reading
A new novel by Austrian author Josef Haslinger recalls the gloomy gulag past of a Bohemian health spa. Continue reading
Thomas Glavinic’ new novel on a trip to Medjugorje, Bosnia-Hercegovina: Unterwegs im Namen des Herren [On the road in the name of the Lord].
Troubles begin early, when the first-person narrator boards “a not quite new coach which will bring me and the other pilgrims from Vienna to Medjugorje. There every day the mother of God appears, in whom I don’t believe unfortunately.” Predictable that for an undercover atheist writer and his photographer Ingo, this must become a living hell, even if he wants to get inspired by such environment.
delirium clemens 