On the surface, The Old Capital tells the story of a year in the life of a young woman in post-war Kyoto, who was adopted as a baby by a couple that owns a store for traditional Japanese clothes. By chance she meets her twin sister and through her learns about her own background. Subplots include two young men’s interest in her and also her adoptive father’s troubles with the changes progress is bringing to his world. However, underneath this simple and rather uninteresting storyline […]
It’s a terrible life.
Set during the first half of the 20th century both in a town near the desert and in different places all over the jungle of Northern Peru, Vargas Llosa interweaves the lives of a native woman, who was raised in a convent, a musician, who builds the brothel called the Green House, a heartless and brutal criminal, who cares only about himself, and four friends, who are always up to no good. First of all, reading this book is hard work. You have to give […]
Slow but steady wins the race… but not always?
This book is a fictionalized account of the life of John Franklin, the famous explorer of the Arctic, who died while trying to find the legendary Northwest Passage. Nadolny seems to have researched Franklin very thoroughly and stays mostly true to the facts, except attributing one additional dominant characteristic to him, and that is “slowness”. This fictional Franklin sees the world differently than other people, because his inner clock is delayed, which means that everything happens too fast for him and he reacts too late. […]
It was the end of the world and it made me cry.
In 1859, during the Battle of Solferino, a young lieutenant saves the life of Emperor Franz Joseph I. of Austria, and so begins the story of the family Trotta, which is paralleled to the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The focus lies mostly on the son and grandson of the Hero of Solferino, who dies relatively early, although his legacy looms over their lives in the same way that the omnipresence of the emperor looms over the lives of his subjects. The book […]