Technically this is the second half of my “I read a bunch of books from Le Monde’s Top 100 Books list. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – 4/5 Stars So this is a novel presented in part as a police investigation. It begins with the bare facts of the case and states that it relies heavily on the accounts of three sources, mainly police investigators. The focus of the novel is about a woman named Katharina Blum who sort of disappeared for a few […]
Listen, you’re not complicated at all. You’re only…You’re just schizophrenic, or a spy…
I haven’t read any other Ismail Kadare books before this one. I am going to. He’s an Albanian writer who wrote a lot of anti-authoritarian novels previously, and has been a perennially listed writer to maybe some day win the Nobel Prize (RIP Nobel Prize?). I also feel like maybe his best work is behind him. This book is interesting in a lot of ways, but it’s so utterly slight in its gravity and form that the promising idea, which is handled with care, does […]