J. M. Coetzee: SLOW MAN (2/5)

Yukio Mishima: THE SOUND OF THE WAVES (5/5)

Mario Vargas Llosa: DEATH IN ANDES (5/5)

Yukio Mishima: THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (5/5)

Milan Kundera: FAREWELL WALTZ (5/5)

Cormac McCarthy: THE ROAD (5/5)

Toni Morrison: THE SONG OF SOLOMON (5/5)

Toni Morrison: THE BLUEST EYE (5/5)

Banana Yoshimoto: KITCHEN (5/5)

Haruki Murakami: DANCE DANCE DANCE (5/5)

Haruki Murakami: AFTER DARK (5/5)

Kazuo Ishiguro: NOCTURNES: FIVE STORIES OF MUSIC AND NIGHTFALL (4.5/5)

This is a collection of five stories about musicians and lovers of music. Three stories, in particular, are exquisite literary pieces: Crooner, Come Rain or Come Shine, and Noctures. Ishiguro mixed comedic situations to sad, sometimes bitter, sometimes painful feelings. Wonderful!!!

Ismail Kadare: THE SUCCESSOR (3.5/5)

This is the continuation of Agamemnon's Daughter. When Enver Hoxha, the Albania dictator of four decades, died, Suzana's father became the designated successor. But because of the pressure imposed by the party to the Successor, brought about by the engagement of Suzana, he committed suicide. Or was he murdered? This novel showed the arbitrariness of a despotic regime on the vantage points of the Minister of the Interior, the Architect, the Guide, and finally, The Successor. The conclusion is shocking, but shallow.

Ismail Kadare: THE FILE ON H. (5/5)

Is Homer the real author of Odyssey and Iliad, or is he just a redactor? This is the main question the two Irish Harvard scholars wish to answer. And they thought that this question can be answered by interviewing rhapsodes in Albania using a newly discovered gadget in the 1930s - tape recorder. Wonderful piece of work!!!

Ismail Kadare: SPRING FLOWERS, SPRING FROST (3.5/5)

It is about disparate things: the discovery of an ancient artifact containing the Kanun, a bank holdup, the revival of vendetta. Anyway, I did not enjoy reading this novel.

Ismail Kadare: BROKEN APRIL (4.5/5)

Broken April is about the traditional blood feud, or vendetta, guided by the ancient law, Kanun, that pervades throughout Albania for a long time.

Ismail Kadare: AGAMEMNON'S DAUGHTER (4/5)

Well, Agamemnon's Daughter has very little to do with one of Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigenia. A very weak connection was made about the sacrifice of a father to a daughter- on one to calm the winds which would have big impact on winning an impending war and on another to protect one's political carreer.

The book contains a novella and two stories. More than the novella, Agamemnon's daughter, the most compelling read is the first story, The Blinding Order. It is about a decree to blind people who are afflicted with evil powers. It discussed the effects of a doltish decree in a dictatorial, cruel regime and the panic it caused to people.

Not the best Kadare book, but compelling just the same.

Imre Kertesz: LIQUIDATION (5/5)

' El delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido (Man's greatest crime is to be born)'
---- Calderon

A metafiction, an unforgetable work from the Nobel laureate for literature, full of great sentences that summed up what it was all about:

'To rebel is to stay alive.'

'The great insubordination is for us to live our lives to the end''

'It was easier to hate than to love, and love for losers was hate.'

Arnost Lustig: WAITING FOR LEAH (5/5)

Without melodrama, without overt manipulation, Arnost Lustig painted the pathos of how it was to be so young in a situation beyond one's control, squeezed by an unfathomable historical maelstrom, so forceful and unescapable: Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I felt very sad after reading this work, one great contribution to the growing collection of holocaust literature.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: LEAF STORM AND OTHER STORIES (4/5)

You can sense that there is a Sophoclean tone in Leaf Storm, as you can hear echoes from Antigone. It is a well-written novella about the town's decision not to bury the remains of a very unpopular doctor. Along the way, all recriminations have been splayed out to explain their collective anger. Unfortunately, while Leaf Storm is superb, all the other stories in the collection are forgetable.

J. M. Coetzee: BOYHOOD (4/5)

A fictional autobiography by the Nobel Prize laureate. This is the first book in the trilogy, which also includes Youth and Summertime. It is a fictional account of his experiences as a boy in Worcester and Cape Town, South Africa. A story of a boy who grew up in a family as though they were of English descent. We can glean through these accounts how it was to grow up as a boy in a racially divided South Africa.

Ismail Kadare: ELEGY FOR KOSOVO (5/5)

In 1389, a Christian coalition, the Balkan group, composed of Serbia, Albania, Rumania, and Bosnia faced the Ottoman Empire, headed by Sultan Murad, together with his two sons: Princes Yakub and Bayezid. The Balkan group was defeated greatly by the Turks. Sultan Murad and Prince Yakub, his heir, were killed by his people, and Prince Bayezid was proclaimed as the new sultan. Sultan Murad's body was brought back to Anatolia, but his blood and intestines were buried on the soil of Kosovo. Through the years, that land was continually haunted and cursed by strife and war: the Catholic Albanians versus the Orthodox Serbs, the ethnic cleansing during Milosovich rule.

This is a wonderful piece of writing from the International Man Booker winner Ismail Kadare.

Mario Vargas Llosa: WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO? (5/5)

Lt. Silva and his assistant, Lituma, also the protagonist in Llosa's Death in Andes, is investigating the death of Palomino Molero, an airforce cadet in an airbase near Talara. The young man was brutally murdered, hung and impaled on a Carob tree. The plot thickens when the airforce colonel, Col. Mindreu, his daughter, Alicia, and Alicia's boyfriend, Lt. Dufo, were somehow connected with the case. Apparently, Alicia's real boyfriend was Palomino.

With Llosa's wry humor, wit, and dash of social commentary, this novel is such a treat.

Saul Bellow: THE ACTUAL (5/5)

This novel was released more than a decade ago, 1997 to be exact, but the 1976 Nobel Prize laureate was still on top of his form. This short novel is touching and at times comedic. It is about Harry Trellman, who grew up in an orphanage, but not an orphan, who looks like a Japanese and studied Chinese, but not Asian, who is enterprising, but not an entrepreneur. It is also about exile: exile by old age, emotional exile.

'A man's road back to himself is a return from his spiritual exile, for that is what a personal history amounts to - exile.'

'There is no leisure for anybody... Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death.'

It is about feelings amassed and kept for years that there is no other recourse but to deal with it and blurt it out.

'Love objects, as psychiatry has named them, are not frequently come by or easily put aside. Distance is really a formality. The mind takes no real notice of it.'

It is so unfortunate that Bellow is not with us anymore. But even in this short work, written at the twilight of his years, we can see clearly the gift he shared with us for almost five decades.

Philip Roth: EXIT GHOST (4/5)

Nathan Zuckerman, the alter ego of Roth, returned to New York after eleven years of isolation in Berkeshire, Massachusetts. Unaware with new terrain, he has to adjust with the changing mores and politics, with old personages, and with haunting memories.

While this might be the last Zuckerman novel, it is no different to others with respect to the writing quality. In fact, some passages are so rich, so intimate, so painful.

'I stopped myself from saying "was everything that followed crushed by these few years?" because the answer was obvious by now. Everything, every last thing.'

'For most people, to say I've stayed in my childhood my whole life would mean I've stayed innocent and it's all been pretty. For you to say I stayed in my childhood my whole life means I stayed in this terrible story- life remained a terrible story. It means that I had so much pain in my youth that, one way or another, I stayed in it forever.'

John Steinbeck: THE PEARL (5/5)

It is a very powerful short novel by John Steinbeck about an Indian couple who discovered a very big pearl, known as the Pearl of the World, and the chaos it brought into their lives.

Roberto Bolano: BY NIGHT IN CHILE (4/5)

By Night in Chile recollects the musings of Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who unintentionally had dealings with the top people in Chilean government during one of the convoluted periods of his country's history: General Pinochet, General Leigh, Admiral Marino, and General Mendoza.

Kazuo Ishiguro: AN ARTIST OF THE FLOATING WORLD (4.5/5)

The novel is an examination of guilt and sentiments of Japanese people after World War II, their take on democracy, and their views on the future of their country. These are captured on the vantage points of Mr. Ono, a famous painter during the war, his two daughters and their husbands, his grandson, his friends and former students.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS (3/5)

A short novel by the maestro of magic realism. It is about a neglected young girl who was claimed to be possessed by the devil. The girl wass the daughter of a Marquis but was raised among the black slaves. The Bishop sent his assistant priest to exorcise the girl, but complications arose when the thirty-six-year old priest fell in love with the girl. A sad and tragic story woven in the grand tradition of a Marquezan terrain.

J. M Coetzee: ELIZABETH COSTELLO (4/5)

This is Coetzee's novel after the much awarded Disgrace and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Elizabeth Costello is an aging novelist, made famous for her work about Marion Bloom, the wife of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist in Joyce's Ulysses. Elizabeth has long stopped writing; she, instead, is now spending time just giving talks about other people's works. Through a series of speeches delivered at different occassions, Mrs. Costello essayed the woman she has come to be: strong-willed and formidable.

Years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Coetzee never rests his laurels and continues to push the limits of the narrative form.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: IN EVIL HOUR (2/5)

A town got into confusion, fear, and chaos when lampoons of unknown source, revealing secrets of some people, were discovered every morning. This compelled Cesar Montero to kill Pastor, a clarinet player who was alledgedly the lover of Cesar's wife. The Mayor who could not do anything to prevent the proliferation of lampoons decided to declare martial law and used this power against his political enemies.

The novel is so rich in meanings and symbols, but unfortunately, it has a very disappointing ending.

Edith Wharton: ETHAN FROME (2.5/5)

This novel by Edith Wharton is about the tragedies in the life of Ethan Frome, a farmer in Starkfield, Massachussetts. Ethan Frome is claimed to be an autobiographical novel: Edith being Ethan, Mattie being Edith's lover, Zenobia as Edith's husband.

Don DeLillo: FALLING MAN (3.5/5)

Falling Man pertains to the man, caught by the camera, who jumped, head first, from one of the towers of World Trade Center on that fateful day of September 11. For this novel, it also pertains to the performance artist who mimicked that man.

This is a novel that examines what happened to a survivor's family immediately following that tragedy: how it changed them and how they coped to move on.

Like any De Lillo novel, this is so well written and, at times, poignant.

Ian McEwan: AMSTERDAM (3.5/5)

This Booker-prize winning novel of Ian McEwan is a fully realized black comedy. It is about four men who became lovers of Molly Lane: Clive Linley, a famous of composer; Vernon Halliday, the editor-in-chief of Judge; Julian Garmony, the foreign secretary; and George Lane, the husband of Molly. It is about how Vernon and Clive turned their friendship into a viscious hate and revenge.

Ian McEwan: ENDURING LOVE (2.5/5)

On a cloudless, beautiful day, a balloon accident happened. People who helped to rescue the child on that balloon were forever changed by that fatal day, when lives would be intertwined and convoluted by that one unfortunate event.

The opening chapter was the most gripping I have read in years!

Goerge Orwell: ANIMAL FARM (5/5)

A group of animals, led by the pigs, in Manor Farm rebelled against their owners. After a triumphant uprising, they run the farm and renamed it as Animal Farm. The story is a thinly veiled characterization of the Bolshevik Revolution against the Russian monarchs, the eventual installation of communism in Russia, and how the communist bureaucracy operated years after.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD (4/5)

It is a short novel from the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez chronicling the tragic story of Santiago Nasser. Five hours after the much heralded marriage of Bayando San Roman and Angela Vicario, the groom returned the bride to her mother. The repercussion of this act conjured events possible only in Marquez's landscape. While the novel is short, it really manifested Marquez's power as a vivid storyteller.

Michel Houellebecq: THE ELEMENTARY PARTICLES (aka ATOMISED) (2.5/5)

This novel won the 2002 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It is about two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno, who pursued divengent paths: one carnal and the other intellectual, both leading to pain and nothingness. The depiction of sex scenes in the novel is very graphic, sometimes even bordering on being pornographic. It is also a framed narrative and the real intention of the writer is only revealed at the end.

Antonio Tabucci: PEREIRA DECLARES (5/5)

The story opened on July 25, 1938 in Lisbon, Portugal. This time, at the dawn of the Second World War, a civil war was being waged in Spain and fanaticism was spreading like wildfire in Germany and Italy.The Spanish civil war started in 1936 when a coup d’etat was launched by a group of Spanish army generals against the 2nd Spanish Republic, then headed by President Manuel Azana. The rebels are called the Nationalists and the government people are called the Republicans. The Republicans were supported by Mexico and the Soviet Union, while the Nationalists, by the Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Portugal. Portugal was then under the dictatorial regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

Under this political climate, the story of a culture-page editor, Dr. Pereira, of a second-class Portugese newspaper, Lisboa, was splayed layer by layer like an old Fellini movie. After the death of his wife, Pereira was only interested in three things: death, the memory of his wife, and the memory of his youth. Apathetic of things happening around him, he met a young Philosophy graduate, Francesco Monteiro Rossi, and his girlfriend Martha. The two, together with confluence of events, would be instrumental for Pereira to finally come to his senses and break free from numbness and apathy.

As this novel is a testament, no wonder Tabucci is often rumored to be one of the contenders of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Joseph Conrad: THE HEART OF DARKNESS (3.5/5)

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—"The horror! The horror!"


Many works, both literary and in film, have been influenced by this work. The historical link of this work is the pillage and atrocities done by King Leopold II of Belgium in Congo Free State. In the novella, Charlie Marlowe narrated how he was hired to go to Congo and captain a steamer to find Mr. Kurtz. And in his travel in the Congo River, from the Central Station to the Inner Station, he saw the horror of the Belgian colonial rule.

Roberto Bolano: THE AMULET (3.5/5)

The narrator is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan, who went illegally to Mexico in 1965. She took odd jobs in the University. She also worked for free in the houses of two poets: Don Leon Felipe and Don Pedro. Leon Felipe died in 1968; Pedro Garfias, in 1967. Oftentimes, she mingled with Mexican poets and professors, hearing all gossips about them.

In October 2, 1968, the riot police invaded the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) during the now infamous Tlatelolco massacre, ten days before the 1968 Mexico Olympics. During this time, Auxilio was in the restroom of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature reading the book of Pedro Garfias. She cannot went out of the restroom for fear of being arrested, tortured, and deported back to Uruguay. The police barricaded UNAM for twelve days, and Auxilio remained inside the restroom, surviving only by drinking water and eating toilet paper. Amid hunger and fear, she remembered her friends and Mexican poets.

Wonderful!

Roberto Bolano: DISTANT STAR (4/5)

This is the first Robert Bolano book I have read. It is a bold, hair-raising account of an autodidact who launched his New Chilean Poetry through murder, gore, torture, excesses, and political connivance with the Pinochet government. I cannot wait to read the other works of Bolano.

Ernest Hemingway: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (5/5)

This is the novella that won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize, and eventually the main cause for Hemingway to win the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year. It is a tale of perseverance, fortitude and courage.

Ma Jian: STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE (4/5)

A man feeling the emotional trauma brought about by a recenly failed marriage travelled to Tibet. Through a series of vignettes, the man experienced Tibet very radically different from his expections- and for all our expectations. Some scenes are very shocking, sparingly told, yet vivid.

This is the novel that caused Ma Jian to be banned in China.

Lloyd Jones: MISTER PIP (4/5)

The story is set in the tropical island of Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea. The story interweaves Charles Dickens's Great Expectations with the lives and experiences of people in the island who were trapped in a civil war. There are scenes in the novel that are shocking and harrowing. This is a wonderful book that punched a great emotional wallop. It is highly recommended.

Ernest Hemingway: THE SUN ALSO RISES (3.5/5)

Well, the novel shows the usual crisp declative sentences Hemingway are known for. This is about the lost generation: people who were in the early 20th century wantonly wasted their time and money gallivanting and drinking. The work featured Hemingway's two predelictions: drinking and bullfighting. It is a well-written work, but nothing much can be said about it, except, of course, that it is about drinking and bullfighting.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: THE GREAT GATSBY (5/5)

This novel is adjudged by Modern Library as the Top 2 novel of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. The novel is the definitive literary work of the 20th century American literature, an accurate image of the glamour, excesses and carelessness of the roaring American 20's, also known as the Jazz Age.