Books: Question 7, by Richard Flanagan, 2023

Not quite a novel, the book is part memoir part journalistic non-fiction, and research-based fictionalization of the development of nuclear science leading to the creation of the atomic bomb.

It is a example of late-modernist type of literature where personal accounts mix with research and scientific exploration of (most frequently) atrocities committed by humanity against itself, wars, genocides, environmental disasters – of the type of W.G. Sebald and his book “The Rings of Saturn.” Or, to use Flanagan’s own example, it follows H. G. Wells, who, he argues, “reinvented journalism as literature, prefiguring much of what literature would become.” Unfortunately, that is indeed what much contemporary literature has become. One need only look at recent Nobel laureates such as Olga Tokarczuk and Annie Ernaux.

The most exciting pages of the book cover the affair between H.G.Wells and Rebecca West. They are full of psychological insight, stylistic craftsmanship, and literary history fictionalized in a hilarious ingenious way.

By contrast, the sections devoted to the author’s earliest memories, family history, and portraits of his parents and relatives come across as deeply narcissistic. The attempt to filter major historical events through intensely personal experience is often irritating, if not self-aggrandizing. Reading and interpreting history through a fictionalized “I” raises questions about the ethical implications of such an approach.

Flanagan’s philosophising about the past, is at best helpless – “the past stays with us, that what was, is and shall be”, what is happening has happened and will always happen and other similar “deep thoughts” sound hollow.

The title of the book is taken from a Chekhov’s story – and again Flanagan misinterprets Chekhov by trying to imbue some grand meaning into the question “Who loves longer.” Where Chekhov is parodying, Flanagan is sentimentalising. The latter is right about one thing – his book is asking questions, without providing answers. As in Chekhov’s stories “the only people who have all the answers are the fools.”

Books: More Than Enough, A Novel by Anna Quindlen, 2026

Anna Quindlen is an achiever in fiction writing. She knows the rules and she is so industrious, so detail oriented, so sensitive to women issues, mood swings, and life’s surprises that you can’t really complain about the quality of her writing. And — still you can! This book attempts to cover absolutely everything—and does so formulaically. It feels as though Quindlen gathered a checklist of every modern female concern, striving to address each one without ever achieving depth or finding an original angle. While she occasionally captures a sharp detail or mirrors a familiar feeling perfectly, the overall narrative ultimately leaves an aftertaste of banality and dissatisfaction.

This clutter is the inevitable result of cramming a dizzying array of subplots into a single novel:

  • Mother-daughter friction
  • Deep father-daughter affection
  • Cross-marital betrayal
  • Late-in-life discovery of a biological father
  • Dealing with a parent’s dementia
  • A sister’s tight bond with her gay brother
  • Watching a fabulous best friend die of cancer
  • Chronic parental self-doubt
  • The quiet grief of a childless family
  • Desperation to conceive
  • A child coping with maternal loss

While Quindlen meticulously anchors these subtopics to her protagonist, the execution feels synthetic. In the end, it feels like she was busy checking boxes rather than writing about life itself.

Books: Contrapposto, A Novel by Dave Eggers, 2026

Contrapposto is another strong novel by Dave Eggers, whose The Circle demonstrated his talent for satirizing the cultural tendencies of the internet age: the erosion of privacy, the oppressive culture of technology companies, and the growing influence of social networks on everyday life.

In Contrapposto (the title refers to the classical artistic pose most famously exemplified by Michelangelo’s David), Eggers turns his attention to the contemporary art world. His target is the dominance of postmodern conceptual art, where technical skill and beauty have increasingly been displaced by interpretation, theory, and narrative.

The novel’s finest pages are those depicting the destructive role of university art education. Eggers’s satirical portrait of Cricket’s art class, where the work of the only genuinely gifted student is mercilessly criticized for being representational, is both hilarious and convincing. Equally entertaining are the scenes set in the gallery during Cricket’s internship and Eggers’s portrayal of the “business” of conceptual art through Kyle, a wildly successful artist who hires technically skilled painters to execute his ideas while he serves merely as the project’s facilitator. In this world, “interpretation” becomes the art per se, while beauty in the classical sense of the word and art’s ability to reveal the mystery of reality have become irrelevant. Some of the university scenes are reminiscent of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, particularly its critique of the contemporary teaching practices in the arts and humanities.

The novel follows Cricket, a talented painter, a someone “who can draw” from childhood to old age. Through him Eggers tries to explore what becomes of an artist unwilling to SELL? At best, he works for figures like Kyle, paints copies of classical masterpieces, or teaches others how to draw. Eggers suggests that there is dignity and contentment in such a life. Recreating beauty and passing on artistic skill are meaningful alternatives to commercial success.

Cricket’s trajectory is contrasted with that of Olympia, the love of his life. Armed with multiple degrees in art, she moves from gallery work and curating to advising wealthy collectors on art investments. Together, Cricket and Olympia embody two opposing ways of living within the art world: one devoted to artistic creation, the other to the institutions and markets that surround it.

The novel raises important questions about the place and purpose of art in contemporary society. Pitching it primarily as a story of friendship between Cricket and Olympia does it a disservice. The sex scenes that accompany their love story are quite campy and rather belong to a conventional romance novel. Yet, as representatives of two competing visions of art and artistic life, Cricket and Olympia are interesting and convincing. Their parallel trajectories, marked by a sympathetic dose of madness, disillusionment, and decline, ring true and contribute to the profound sadness that permeates the novel’s closing pages.

Books: Rivals, A Novel by Jilly Cooper, 1988

The ultimate politically incorrect book!

I came across Jilly Cooper when exploring subgenres of the romance novel. What a prolific writer she is – and how popular she was in the 1980s! Her specialty is the “bonkbuster”: a novel that involves sex, glamour, wealth, power, and plenty of rivalry – business or sexual or both…Her women are “bitches” and her men are “macho”. Cooper herself once complained that her American film adaptations are “demachoing” her characters.

Cooper gets thumbs up for her satirical or quite cynical representation of the upper middle class and all the stupidity and arrogance underlying wealth. Another favorite topic of hers is talent – talented characters can get away with anything. This is exemplified in characters like Declan, Rebecca, Lizzie -a journalist, a producer, and a writer, respectivly. And the author’s ultimate favorite is a character like Rupert Campbell-Black – a sparkling combination of physical beauty, wit, and cynicism (but eventually revealing the macho’s romantic underbelly). One can’t help giving Cooper credit for being able to handle multiple characters tangled in complex relationships, intrigue, drama, failure and triumph to result eventually in a pop-culture’s trashy page-turner. Her concept of human psychology is quite superficial and her achiever characters’ motivation is mainly what passes for success – wealth, power, social recognition, and above all – “winning”!

Apart from some witty lines, the book is quite forgettable but undeniably hits some buttons that the audience always responds to – what would it be if they become suddenly very rich, handsome, sexually irresistible, smart and popular?!

Dream on, ladies…

Films: TV: Cape Fear, TV Series, 2026

Braking a major rule here – writing a review after watching only episode one of the newly released Cape Fear! But usually the first episode sets the stage for what is to be expected. And it is not good. Not good, at all. And “it is the script, stupid”!One can only feel sorry for the talented actors doing their best with such substandard material, especially given the strength of the previous adaptations.

I suppose, the major blame goes to creator Nick Antosca and a long list of staff writers.

The main flaws:

The main character Max Cady, just released from prison, is introduced in a very unintelligent way. At a major fundraising event, he takes the microphone from Ana Bowden—who seems oddly unbothered by the interruption—and proceeds to deliver a long, dull, and dumb speech. Writers, what were you thinking?

The threat that is supposed to surround the Bowden family couldn’t be more banal and silly as well – skunks drowned in their pool, front door alarm sounding, AND a real tiger appearance. To turn a tiger metaphor from the 1991 Cape Fear (Scorcese) into a zoo animal – how literal can you go!

The Bowden family itself is quite sleazy so why route for them? The ex-prisoner, the supposed embodiment of evil, lacks layers and layers of complexity so perfectly intertwining in Robert DeNiro’s interpretation of Cady in the 1991 version.

Not worth watching further.

Books: There Are Rivers in the Sky, A Novel by Elif Shafak, 2024

It is an amazing, deeply moving, and very ambitious piece of literature.

The novel spans centuries while unfolding a parallel narrative set in Ancient Mesopotamia, Victorian England, modern London, and tracking the devastating story of the Yazidis genocide in Iraq and Kurdistan over several decades. This is not just a novel based on historical research. Shafak is able to morph her literary style to sound like Scheherezade when talking about Mesopotamia, or like Dickens when describing Victorian London which is quite a feat and requires talent! The most fascinating reading for me were the pages dedicated to Victorian London and the fictional character King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums (based on the real person George Smith, the Assyriologist credited with deciphering the cuneiform tablets and especially The Epic of Gilgamesh.) But of course, there were many more parts of the novel – from the description of 19 c. Istanbul to the lifestyle of a modern tattooist in London who drinks coffee with dried lavender leaves, that bring real jouissance of reading.

Another literary feat that this novel is able to pull off is the use of the metaphor of water – in its various forms. From the single drop of water falling on Emperor Ashurbanipal’s beard to the muddy waters of the Thames and the Tigris, and the tears of the main characters (abounding), the clouds and the underground rivers burried under the cement of big cities – the story of water which has its own DNA ties together the various narratives.

This is an example how a novel can be educating, expanding one’s knowledge of the world, compassionate, as well as promoting its own political agenda but also talented, written in a way so that language becomes the device of expanding your world and allowing you to discover your own humanity. But beware, a wave of sadness descends on the reader as she progresses through the book’s pages.

Books: Taiwan Travelogue, A Novel by Yang Shuang-zi, 2024

The novel won the International Booker Prize for 2026. I would love to have someone explain to me what is the literary value (yes, the literary one, not the political one) of this travelogue. And a travelogue it is! Its main contribution is the detailed description of Taiwan’s railway schedules and delicious Taiwanese cuisine.

The novel uses two, now tired, literary tricks.

The first is the familiar framing device involving the discovery and rediscovery of a supposedly real but actually fictional manuscript. Here, it takes the form of a “new translation” of a nonexistent travel memoir written by a Japanese author visiting Taiwan and becoming attracted to her Taiwanese translator.

The second device is the use of food as the primary attraction of the narrative. Several recent Asian bestsellers follow the same formula — for example, Butter by Asako Yuzuki or The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai. In Taiwan Travelogue, the protagonist is essentially a glutton who discovers the country through its street food.

To be fair, the food motif works better than the rest. It serves to fill the pages of this short book with mouthwatering descriptions of Taiwanese dishes and ingredients. But this becomes a flavorful substitute for depth in a novel that ultimately has little to say. The author’s deepest insights amount to observations such as: “Real travel means living in a foreign country.”

The judges of the International Booker Prize have, of course, strained to identify some commentary on colonialism — for example, the suggestion that enjoying a country’s cuisine because it is “exotic” rather than genuinely “delicious” reflects a colonial mindset. Other boxes are checked off as well: women pressured into marriage, same-sex attraction, and condescending attitudes toward educated or career-oriented women.

Yet all of these themes are treated in an extremely lightweight manner, while critics call this approach – “ironic” or “multilayered.”

Books: Yesteryear, A Novel by Caro Claire Burke, 2026

This book was “workshopped” by film producers and Hollywood executives from its very first draft. As a result, it becomes a product of the very process it claims to criticize: marketing shapes creation itself, substance is overtaken by image, and the fake replaces the real. The Hollywood “influencers” behind the project manufacture a business product designed to appeal to a mass audience, and that audience is implied in every sentence. That is why the book’s politics feel so transparent.

The novel sets up a simplistic opposition between the “tradwife” and “the feminist” through Natalie and Reena, two characters constructed largely as clichés. Natalie is raised with conservative Christian values and wishes to become the perfect tradwife. Deeply unhappy, however, she builds an online influencer business around a fabricated image of idyllic family life on a traditional farm. Her supposedly Christian lifestyle is carefully produced for broadcast and, beneath the performance, proves abusive both to her children and to the people working around her.

Reena, meanwhile, is presented as the embodiment of modern feminism: promiscuous, detached from family life, and unable to succeed in her desired career because she is constantly undermined by the boys’ club around her. Both women are reduced to flattened cardboard characters.

Another contrast the novel exploits to advance its political message is the opposition between the fake tradwife lifestyle and the “real” life of a pioneer woman. Through its depiction of nineteenth-century rural America, the novel ultimately arrives at the predictable conclusion that modern women, unsurprisingly, have it better.

Because the book appears to have had “too many cooks,” the plot twists often feel confusing, with characters making arbitrary choices that do not emerge from any coherent inner logic. Natalie, for example, is the supposedly devout Christian girl, yet from the very beginning she is deeply cynical and frequently turns into the kind of “angry woman” the novel seems eager to critique elsewhere.

The book also tries to catalogue nearly every contemporary social issue imaginable: gender politics, child abuse, political campaigning, the MAGA movement, and even “mother’s little helper.” It wants to address everything and everyone, all while pushing an unmistakably clear agenda: the children who do not know what the “ocean” is and have never seen it are meant to symbolize people trapped within the Bible Belt — an extremely easy metaphor. Easy metaphors may serve propaganda, but they rarely serve literature.

As literature, the novel is quite boring. It could easily have been at least 150 pages shorter. Some sections — especially those depicting the hardships of the pioneer woman — read as though they were written by AI.

It would actually be interesting to see the novel’s original draft before the workshop process reshaped it. Perhaps, in that earlier version, the witty lines prevailed.

Books: They were sisters, A Novel by Dorothy Whipple (1943)

It is always a pleasure to discover an underrated female author from the twentieth century. This book felt like a welcome palate cleanser after the flood of mediocre works so aggressively promoted through social media, trade magazines, and even the book sections of reputable newspapers. It is impossible to keep up with every recommendation, yet many of them fall short as lasting literature. It seems that books gain attention more for the identity they represent rather than for their literary merit.

Dorothy Whittle is a master storyteller in the tradition of nineteenth-century critical realism. The fates of the three sisters are shaped by their marriages and their differing conceptions of love. The domestic dramas of the three sisters are rendered with an observant, almost detached narrative voice, in which the perspectives of the children play a crucial role. Through their eyes, the tragedy of Charlotte unfolds, and it is also through them that Lucy and Vera begin to understand their own situations as women and wives.

Charlotte chooses the role of the obedient wife, becoming a prisoner of her own weakness and, in the process, sacrificing her children. Vera, by contrast, is the free-spirited lover who prioritizes pleasure and personal freedom above all else—also at the expense of her children. Both paths prove ultimately self-destructive. The third sister assumes the role of the savior: accommodating, self-sacrificing, and compassionate. Yet she, too, is denied fulfillment—her marriage is sensible and stable, but devoid of romantic passion, grounded in friendship rather than romantic love.

This is not a feminist novel in the conventional sense. It largely upholds a bourgeois view in which a woman’s fate is determined by marriage. And yet, the depth and precision of the characterization allow the novel to transcend this framework. It offers a subtle and compelling portrayal of a shared malaise—a melancholic dimension of the female psyche rooted in the constraints placed upon women’s choices.

Films: Hament, Dir.Chloé Zhao, 2025

The biggest issue is that the film is based on a very weak — not to say ridiculous — novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Chloé Zhao’s decision to adapt this particular book does not reflect especially well on her intelligence. How many stories about women-healers mistaken for witches can one endure? How many female characters cast as embodiments of “Mother Nature” are we expected to feel deeply for? And how many blood-soaked childbirth scenes hovering on the edge of death can a single film sustain?

Shakespeare’s wife giving birth among the enormous, fairy-tale roots of a tree — if this is not kitsch, what is? We see Shakespeare being slapped around by his father. Then the playwright suddenly grows restless — though we are given no real reason why — and leaves his wife to endure the birth of their second child alone. She refuses to give birth inside the house and insists on delivering the baby among the tree roots. Shall I go on?

I feel genuinely sorry for Jessie Buckley, who is a very good actress (The Lost Daughter) and deserves better material. As for Paul Mescal — less so. Throughout the entire film he looks silly and ridiculous.