This week, a new and very interesting book, dear friends, Yang Shuang-zi’s 2020 novel, Taiwan Travelogue. Originally published in Taiwan,   this book has been short-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize and was translated to English by Lin King in 2024. What the heck is very interesting about this novel? you say. Well, on the surface, it appears to be a reprint of an old travel book about a Japanese woman visiting Taiwan in the late 1930s. The publisher has taken pai

This just in— The Wax Child  did not make the cut for the International Booker Prize short list. Oh, oh, the wax child isn’t going to like that. The Wax Child  by Olga Ravn is a story set in historic time—early 17 th  century Denmark. However, there is no statement of this in the beginning of the text. Of course, due to a phenomenon we have previously noted, the reader who comes to this book no doubt has some preconceptions that may include the story’s historic setting. Indee

Last time, I proposed discussing the effect of utilizing an inanimate narrator in Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child . Here goes: This is not the first story to have an inanimate narrator. Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red features narration by the color red; a fig tree does the job in Elif Shafak's  The Island of Missing Trees . (‘Kay, a tree is alive, but you get the idea). Indeed, we could say that many novels feature an omniscient narrator with no identifying information provided abou

“No one listens to a thing I say. Although I speak all the time.” So says the unnamed, inanimate narrator of Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child . Who hears it then? Someone—more on this later. What we know about this narrator is that it was created by Christenze Crucknow, who carried this wax effigy beneath her right arm as if it was a real human infant in utero. Why, you ask, would someone do this, making an effigy and treating it in this manner?   “Wax effigies in witchcraft are fig

When we left off looking at the fourth story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is,  the protagonist, Balazs, a twenty-eight-year-old Hungarian man on business in London, has just experienced a somewhat enchanted afternoon with Emma, the object of his erotic longing. Emma, who has always seemed unapproachable and distant, shows Balazs a new side, expressing curiosity and affection toward him, which he finds stunning. Her questions force him to confront his lonely and meaningless

We left off last time in our consideration of David Szalay’s fourth story in the collection All That Man Is,  with the protagonist, Balazs, realizing, perhaps belatedly, that the object of his erotic obsession, Emma, is a high-class prostitute. Moreover, he is employed by her husband, Gabor, to provide security for her during a working trip to London. “It is awkward, especially that first night.” This describes Balazs’ experience sitting most of the night in a car with Gabor,

I was going to embark on a new story this week, a new book, that is, but I’ve been enjoying the David Szalay book, All That Man Is , so much that I wanted to focus on one more of its stories, the third one, also untitled. As we’ve noted, all the stories in this collection have as their protagonist, a man of a particular age. This story has to do with Balazs, a Hungarian man in his late twenties. So, in keeping with the rest of the book, we would expect this story to explore i

Last time, we left off amidst David Szalay’s linked short story collection All That Man Is . We were studying the final story which deals with Tony, a man near the end of his life. Unfortunately for Tony, he has just been in a serious car accident and is recovering. We the readers wonder if this traumatic experience leads to some transformation in a character who is darkly focused on the meaninglessness of his life. Tony’s wife Joanna drives him home from the hospital. “On th

Hello. We are in the middle of examining the final, untitled story in David Szalay’s collection All That Man Is . Last time, we noted how things begin with the protagonist, a seventy-three-year-old man named Tony, pre-occupied with thoughts of death and the end of his individual existence which seems to make his life lack meaning. As we continue, Tony talks to the cleaning lady and has breakfast. He checks email and reads one from his daughter Cordelia (King Lear fans take no

Hello, we’re back! Today, we’ll examine the final (ninth of nine) story in David Szalay’s book, All That Man Is . To begin this one, there is no title, but we have an epigraph:   Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.   This is the beginning of W.H. Auden’s 1940 poem, If I Could Tell You. We’ve noted how Mr. Szalay seems to appreciate the poet Philip Larkin and weave Larkin’s style into his

Last time, we left off studying the fourth, unnamed story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is , a tale of a man in his early thirties, an English graduate student who is involved in a love affair with a woman named Waleria. The protagonist (whose name is Karel—I forgot that he was named last time) is delivering an expensive, leased car to a man in Poland, a man who happens to be Valeria’s father, and plans to meet Valeria and spend a few days with her at a German resort. We saw

This time, let’s examine the fourth story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is . It is untitled and tells a tale about an unnamed man who we can infer is about thirty years old. He is English, a graduate student at Oxford in Medieval German Languages, and is involved with a Polish woman, who is named, Waleria. He has a side job of delivering leased luxury cars throughout Europe, and the story occurs during one of these deliveries when he’s arranged to meet up with Waleria and st

We left off seeking answers to the question, “What Am I Doing Here?” which is posed in the first story in David Szalay’s linked story collection All That Man Is . Each story in this book covers different men who progress in age from youth to old age, so in this first story where the protagonist, Simon, is seventeen, the question is, what is a seventeen-year-old doing here in his life? Last time, I mentioned the influence of the British poet Philip Larkin on this story and the

Today, let’s look at David Szalay’s (pronounced SOL-loy) 2015 book, “ All That Man Is .” Mr. Szalay recently won the Booker Prize for his novel, “ Flesh .” The book is a series of nine linked short stories—not that they share characters but have similar themes. Each concerns a man of a defined age, beginning with seventeen and continuing up to seventy-three, who is usually away from home and becomes pre-occupied with questioning the meaning of his life. Well, okay, all of us

Cesar Pavese’s novella The House on the Hill  has an unconventional structure, one that lulls the reader into thinking things will be one way, and then showing them as being different, thereby underscoring the story’s point about wartime trauma. As mentioned last time, the story, which takes place during a “state of siege” in 1943 Italy, has to do with a man—the narrator—who escapes the nightly bombing of Turin by going to the countryside. There he meets Cate, a fellow refuge

Traditionally, stories, long and short, follow a structure—in fact one who veers very far out of this structure risks losing a reader’s attention, conditioned as we are to the familiar. A story is typically about the transformation or failed transformation of a central character who may or may not be the narrator. A story begins with the showing of this character’s existence pre-transformation. A short way in, an event occurs which sets the process of transformation into moti

This week, a new work, Cesare Pavese’s semi-autobiographical 1949 novella, The House on the Hill . I am reading a 1968 New York Review of Books edition that includes three other of Pavese’s short novels, The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese . The story begins: “For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods.” In classic story-telling fashion, we the readers are presented with a first person narrator, an “I,” who looks back from the fu

Last time, during my discussion of Samanta Schweblin’s story Eye in the Throat,  an audience member questioned the value of re-reading fiction, and today, I hope to address these concerns. (The audience member has been silenced). I suppose the best reason to re-read a story or novel would be that you like it. I want to argue that because of the complexity of fiction, re-reading also enriches your understanding of a text. Every reading is different, a savant has said. Our frie

The second story I’d like to discuss in Samanta Schweblin’s collection Good and Evil and Other Stories is called Eye in the Throat.  It’s long, forty pages, a size that pushes it into novella range. Yes, please note the use of the present tense combined with first person narration. It begins: “My father picks up the phone.” What follows is a description of how the narrator’s father, in 1990s Argentina, received phone calls during the night in which no one spoke. “The silence

Hello to all. Today, I want to write about Samanta Schweblin’s brand new collection of long short stories, translated as Good and Evil  from the Spanish El Buen Mal . I will discuss two of the stories, first William in the Window  and then An Eye in the Throat . Samanta Schweblin has published two novels and, counting Good and Evil , three short story collections. She is originally from Argentina.   The Spanish speakers among us might say, “Hold up! Good and Evil is not a lit