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Miranda July lets a female first person narrator tell the story of her mid-life crisis (I hesitate to use this cliché label because, though the crisis happens in mid-life, but there is more to it). She married her older husband, Harriss, when she was thirty. She moved into his house using its garage as her…
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Unlike Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, a novel that features an all-knowing narrator of the lives of his characters, Dahlia de la Cerda’s Reservoir Bitches is a collection of 13 short stories with first person narrators, even when the character who narrates her story has died already. The first story begins with the sentence, “I sat on…
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The novels I have recommended in this series so far have a wide range of settings, protagonists, and interactional arrangements. Perhaps, summaries of a few lines can provide a first orientation about what they are about and thereby help answer the question of whether one should go on reading the brief description, not to mention…
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This is a novel about Anna and Tom who arrived in Berlin fleeing the pressure of conformity in their Southern European home country. They were in their early twenties, and Berlin still offered “that potential and abundance” Anna and Tom craved for. They did not want to follow “another generation’s script” but find their own…
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Volume 2: No Tomorrow. London: John Murray. 2018. 248 pp. Volume 3: Die For Me [UK: Endgame]. London: John Murray. 2020. 228 pp. All those who have watched the hit TV-series “Killing Eve” will be well-familiar with the key protagonists (and adversaries, with ambivalent bonds developing among them), Villanelle and Eve Polastri. The former is…
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Chapter 1: Containment is not possible This book is about the “rise and spread of technologies” that take “the form of world-changing waves” (p. 6). According to the authors, the world is now “in an unprecedented moment of exponential innovation and upheaval, an unparalleled augmentation that will leave little unchanged” (p. 7). The drivers of…
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There are two main protagonists in this novel, Fanny and the “Narrator.” They were close childhood friends but then lost touch. He meets her again after he has grown up, developed a secure and stable self, and found his place in mainstream society. Reading played a big part in this process of entering ordinary everyday…
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The novels I have earlier recommended in this series have a wide range of settings, actors, and interactional arrangements. Waldman’s novel is set in a big box store the size of several football fields, with 150 employees and six departments, located in Potterstown, New Jersey. However, the story (told mostly in dialogue) concerns only one…
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Ia Genberg. 2024. The Details. Translated by Kira Josefsson. London: Wildfire. 151 pp. Jente Posthuma. 2023. What I’d Rather Not Think About. Melbourne, London, Minneapolis: Scribe. 203 pp. All three books were among those six shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize. I suggest them together because they are rather short at 93, 151, and…
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Angus Deaton, a native of Scotland (born 1945), migrated from the UK to the USA in the early 1980s. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on consumption, poverty, and welfare. The book describes his personal and professional experiences in the USA after his arrival. It has chapters on…
Books worth reading 