This week, as we wrap up our reading of Three Horses, a little background on the concept of the implied author. (Whiny voice: Are you...

The narration in Three Horses is written in first person. After all, the very first word is “I,” as in “I only read used books.” Is this...

Besides Laila, the other key character in Three Horses is Selim, a man whom the narrator befriends and helps, acts of kindness which have...

Usually, in this blog, I don’t want to merely describe the plots of the books I discuss in the manner of a book review. My purpose is to...

As mentioned last week, Erri De Luca, the author of Three Horses, states he can only write about things he’s experienced, placing himself...

This week, a new novel, Erri De Luca’s 1999 book Three Horses, translated from Italian to English by Michael Moore in 2005. I first read...

The Sea is the story of a troubled man who, after great personal tragedy, returns obsessively to the site of an earlier tragedy and...

The drowning of Chloe and Myles Grace, is alluded to mysteriously in The Sea’s first line: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the...

A central question (not the only one) in The Sea is to whom is the narrator, Max, addressing his narration? Max’s narrative has the feel...

The premise of The Sea is that, after the death of his wife, a man is grieving, trying to go on but struggling, not only with the loss,...

This week, a new novel: John Banville’s The Sea, published in 2005 and the winner of that year’s Man Booker Prize. It begins: “They...

One of the ways Olive K. is novel-like is the development throughout the book of the main character, Olive Kitteridge. The first chapter,...

Is Olive K. a dis-continuous narrative in the manner of such modernist works as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury? So says the Wikipedia...

‘Kay. A long post today, so let’s begin. No interruptions, please, we can take questions at the end. Last week, we considered the concept...

The fifth story in Olive, “Starving” begins: “At the marina on Saturday morning, Harmon had to work not to stare at the young couple.”...

First, a personal note. For the first time in some sixty weeks, my blog did not have a new entry last Thursday. Readers were, I know,...

This week, a new book, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008. Ms. Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for...

I have said that, in Emigrants, Max Sebald relied for content on the stories of real people, including an unnamed narrator who was...

The last section in Emigrants is entitled Max Ferber. Here, our narrator is a youth in his early twenties who escapes life in Germany...

The third section of Emigrants, Ambros Adelwarth, is all about revenants, people who return, people who are thought of as dead but come...