Book Reviews - archived

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• Some Thomas Hardy Books

  15 March 2009 by Ray

  Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
  This novel was the first of Thomas Hardy’s major works, and this Penguin Classics edition is the first time it has ever been published in its original manuscript form, without the zillion cuts and corrections made by the editor of the original serialized (...)

• Some George Eliot books

  14 March 2009 by Ray

  Adam Bede (1859)
  A rich, complex, indubitably well-written tale of seduction and disappointment in a bucolic, pastoral setting that has its charms, even though one could find the almost ethnological concentration on the ways and manners of the village people herein portrayed not quite as (...)

• Some Ismail Kadare books

  13 March 2009 by Ray

  Chronicle in Stone (1970)
  A homely and almost nostalgic evocation of life in a sleepy provincial Albanian town in the 1940s before, during, and after its occupation by Italian, German and partisan forces (in that sequence) during the Second World War. The politics are almost surprisingly (...)

• Some E.T.A. Hoffmann books

  12 March 2009 by Ray

  The Devil’s Elixirs (1815)
  Hoffmann is one of the masters of the romantic movement in Germany, he is one of my favourite authors, and this book is usually considered to be his masterpiece, so Achtung!
  This novel, his first, about the doings of a strange monk who guards a mysterious elixir of (...)

• Some Mario Vargas Llosa books

  10 March 2009 by Ray

  The Cubs and other stories (1959)
  This was Mario Vargas Llosa’s first published story, about growing up and learning about life on the streets in Lima, a theme he developed extensively in his impressive first full-length novel The Time of the Hero (La ville et les chiens). Darned interesting. (...)