Felipe sees bodies in every corner of Santiago, and seeks to match their numbers with the official death toll, arriving at a perfect number with no survivors. As for "Iquila" and "Paloma", they share the memory of a mysterious and cloudy childhood meeting, and a friendship that linked the parents of one of them with the parents of the other, in the past.
The three embark on an unexpected journey to recover the body of Paloma's mother, after she was stuck in Argentina due to volcanic ash.
Through a different and new narrative, Alia Trabuco Theran, in her novel that was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, tells us about the past that has not passed, about the dark family legacy of the children of those who lived under the Pinochet dictatorship, and about confronting the pain that extends across generations.
After the enthusiastic revolutionaries attacked Hoshanak's house and burned musical instruments, books, and all the things they considered forbidden, he decided to leave Tehran, taking his wife, Rosa, his two sons, Sohrab and Beta, and the third daughter, Bahar, to settle in a distant village, hoping Preserving their intellectual freedom and their lives. But they soon find themselves caught up in the chaos of the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution sweeping the country.
The fates of all family members change, and they are divided between pain and memory, between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and the times, events, and narrative spaces that “Bahar” narrates intersect, mixing violence and brutality with mysticism, meditation, magic, and myths, invoking oral narrative traditions to confront cruelty with the power of imagination.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020, Green Plum Tree's Rise is a fascinating journey through Persian history and mythology, woven in the style of magical realism, exploring the fate of hope and dream in Iran today.
Peralbo plays jazz in Lady Bird, where Lucrezia heard him and became passionate about his music, and he fell in love with its mystery.
After a long time, the narrator meets that musician “Peralbo” again, but now he takes the name “Giacomo Dolphin” and lives a different life. What happened during these years? Why did he change his name? What is the story of the stolen painting? Is the title of the song “Lisbon,” which is repeated over and over again, the key to the mysterious past?
In the humid rainy streets, in night bars drowned in smoke, and in nights filled with blue and pink lights, and to the rhythm of jazz music, the novel’s heroes strive to understand love, music, and the secret of a city from which there is no point in escaping, because it will follow them to the ends of the world.
In this novel, which won the National Prize for Literature and the Critics' Prize in Spain, Antonio Muñoz Molina writes, with a graceful detective plot, a love poem in love with music.
At the Carnival in Venice, a wealthy Mexican meets a person disguised as the last Aztec king of Mexico: Montezuma, who was killed by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. He also meets three European musical geniuses who filled the history of music with their immortal works: the Venetian Antonio Vivaldi, the Neapolitan Scarlatti, and the English-German. Handel. Did he go back to the eighteenth century? Or did they advance to the twentieth century?
In this masterpiece, there is a mixture of truth and fiction, a jump between dates, a mixing of characters and roles, falsification of facts, and skepticism of history, all brought together by Alejo Carpentier within a Baroque concerto in which European music meets African rhythms, and you can imagine the music that resonates within the lines. And the voices that get louder, and the breaths that stop...
Trying to finally reconcile with a past that has been haunting her throughout her life, Coco tells the story of her family across several generations, starting with the ancestor, Albert Louis, an ambitious man who left his land trying to recreate himself as a man with wealth, passing through his children and grandchildren, and ending with her herself: Coco,” the narrator feels she must tell this tale, and it will be the monument she builds to the dead. It is the debt that must be repaid. A story devoid of great executioners and venerable martyrs, but it will nonetheless have the weight of flesh and blood, because it is the story of its people, of their dreams and hopes, of their delusions, of their failures, and of their complex legacy from which the entire race suffers.
“The Sinful Life” is a novel overflowing with interwoven stories and full of details that provide important testimony about the lives of middle-class families in the Caribbean. It was written by Maryse Conde, the Guadeloupe novelist who won the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2018, with infinite sweetness and warmth, based largely on the history of... Her own family. She wrote it as a monument to build for the dead, thus paying off her debt as well.
It is a strange memory, the memory of a child whose grandmother brought her to her home on the island of Majorca, due to the death of her mother, the illness of her nanny, and her father’s busyness. The war surprised her one holiday when she was fourteen. She accurately records in her memory everything she sees, including trees, rocks, sea, air, lights, colors, events, and the echoes of war far and near at the same time, and cowardice, betrayal, and treachery. She records feelings of hatred, revenge, fear, and love, her first love that is devoid of lust due to the absence of instinct. When she becomes a woman, and she is still playing with dolls, her doll is Black Gorogo, the chimney sweep that she brought from afar, from one of Andersen’s stories. So the times mix with each other, and the present moment calls for the near and distant past moment, and the latter may be longer than the first moment because it took its place in the memory and settled, and therefore parentheses, doubles, and abundant details abound without making one feel bored. Because all of this is written in a sublime language and in the style of a first-class writer: Anna Maria Matute.
The novel “The First Memory” won the Nadal Prize in 1959, which is one of the most prestigious and prestigious literary awards in Spain.
Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm takes the controversy and controversy raised by Salman Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses” in the late 1980s as a starting point to address what he calls “the mentality of prohibition and the logic of criminalization” among Arab thinkers, in a panoramic manner, and in other articles - added in later editions of the book - he addresses many of the issues Related issues, such as Orientalism, reverse Orientalism, concepts of cultural invasion, and authenticity. The writer dives behind the implicit meanings, trying to reach the essence, or the real motive behind the issues he discusses, and raises his voice loudly to argue and discuss the opinions of his fellow researchers and intellectuals: such as Edward Said and Adonis. The audacity makes these sober articles an important document of the discussions and dialogues that prevailed among Arab thinkers at that stage, even if one does not agree with any of them. What is important here is the celebration of free thought and debate based on diligence and knowledge.
Although the deep, passionate, and enjoyable discussions contained in this book provide many answers, they also stimulate many renewed questions that continue to trouble us and justify our need for readings of this kind.
Cristina Fernandez Cubas does not introduce her heroines to us easily. She takes us on straight paths at first glance, and at one moment, she turns everything upside down. We discover that her characters are torn between two realities, the separation between which is very precise: the fixed reality, and the imagined or delusional reality. . One of them overpowers the other at times, and at other times a reconciliation occurs between them, without us knowing which of them truly exists, and which of them does not exist.
“Nona’s Room,” which won the Critics’ Prize in Spain (2015) and the National Narrative Award (2016), is a magnifying glass through which we see the complexities of the human soul and the mystery that surrounds our lives without us always succeeding in observing and understanding it. In it, “Cubas” reconsiders childhood and maturity. And loneliness and family, revealing to us that nothing is really as it seems, writing all of this in transparent language and in a unique style that gives it a detective touch, with skill and lightness.
Owned houses and others are rented, fleeting and temporary dwellings, between which the writer moves across different Syrian cities, turning the houses into stations, or rest stops that allow her to contemplate the context of her life, her choices, and the source of her desire to remain between closed doors. The subjective nature of the book turns it into a kind of personal testimony, but Nour Abu Farraj is betting that her memories may intersect to a large degree with the experiences of middle-class young men and women from the 1980s generation in Syria, who lived a relatively stable life, before the war came and made a difference in their context. Forcibly expel them from their safe spaces.
In the face of the transience and uncertainty that war brings, description becomes a tribute to the fleeting; This is why the book tries to remind readers of the long time it takes to build a house, in the symbolic or structural sense, but it nonetheless warns them against becoming captives to the place, and encourages them to carry their homes as souvenirs, or small luggage on their long journey.
Khaled is a young man in his thirties who graduated from the College of Fine Arts. He failed to travel from his city of “fairies,” which was closing in on him from all sides, so he had no choice but to work as an employee in a bookstore, through which he practiced an additional, secret job in which he sold his works of fiction. Life would have gone better if one could keep the secret, but as Faraj, Khaled’s father, says: “No matter how much you hide it, the secret will wake up inside you one day, and then it will continue to burrow into your soul until it is released to the world.” Thus, Khaled’s choices in life soon put him in the face of “Khalil Nayef,” a lawyer with wide influence who wants to enter the world of writing.
Within a suspenseful context and a rapid pace, Tamim Heneidi dives into the scenes of the relationships between writers, publishers, and bookstore owners, and sheds light on the way in which culture may be used to polish the image of the political class created by the war. But can books perform a task like this?
The characters of this novel are searching for a different life. Some of them leave their work in the cotton factory and become sex workers in the hot springs resort, while one of them enters prison of his own accord in search of calm. A third goes to her hometown, discovering strange caves and tunnels, while a fourth chooses a refuge in A rural province, where Chinese herbs are used in traditional medicine.
These characters are intertwined in multiple emotional and physical relationships, while each of them seems like a mirror of the other, as the story of each of them begins where the previous one left off, in a fluid temporal structure.
In this novel, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, Tsun Shieh writes about the meaning of life in its relationship to love, sex, birthplace and work, and about the vanishing border between life and death, between wakefulness and sleep, in a blurry and turbulent plot full of sensual descriptions and vivid metaphors. , its aspects resonate with echoes of magical realism.
“I am not Stiller!” The protagonist begins his writing with this phrase, and writes seven notebooks in order to prove that he is not who everyone insists he is. He confesses to unsolved murders, and tells the details of his previous life in Mexico and America among the cowboys and dock workers, but nevertheless, Stiller's wife, friends, and brother adhere to their opinion, while the hero of the novel writes what they say in his notebooks and comments on it, the life of that sculptor, and his emotional relationships. And marriage, and about art and artists and the ups and downs of their lives.
"Stieler" is considered one of the literary pearls, and one of the most important contemporary novels written in German. It is an exceptional novel about modern man and his fractured relationship with identity, and about the self-image of oneself and others. It is a novel written with tenderness and a complex artistic structure that is convincing and enjoyable at the same time. It highlights the exceptional ability of the famous Swiss writer, Max Frisch.
