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.

Films: Sentimental Value, Dir. Joachim Trier, 2025

Isn’t it unbelievable that this film is considered the best European film of 2025?! Poor European film industry—how far it has sunk. This is not a bad film, but it is such a lightweight creation in every respect.

First of all, the script is a pathetic attempt to manufacture a Chekhovian drama out of a family-reunion story. It is heavy with clichés and obsessively focused on the self-indulgent “issues” of the so-called creatives of this world—filmmakers and actors in particular. The introductory scene centers on the main character’s stage-fright “drama,” played with ambitious self-importance and pedal-to-the-metal intensity by Renate Reinsve.

Her father, a famous director, offers her a role in his latest autobiographical film (yet another narcissistic element). They have been estranged for years, and the mother has passed away. There are grievances to be aired and guilt to be atoned for. The daughter refuses the role, and both sisters want nothing to do with the father. This is the core conflict of the film. Please! Chekhov’s characters wrestled with far greater questions—such as the meaning of life or the impossibility of happiness. Compare that to two daughters sulking over their father’s return and his failed attempts to involve them in his next film project.

Stellan Skarsgård could have played this role with his eyes closed. Meanwhile, the overachiever quality in Renate Reinsve’s performance is far too conspicuous; it is as if she approaches every scene with the attitude of, “Look how good an actress I am!”

The film’s ending does carry a certain sentimental value, but it is nowhere near enough to elevate it into genuinely good cinema.

Books: Before I Forget, A Novel by Tory Henwood Hoen, 2025

It is no accident that this book is a bestseller. Essentially, it is a self-help book presented in fictional form—and the fiction is of high quality without being great literature. The novel gently guides the reader through personal failure, coping with death and loss, and dealing with guilt, all in a mellow, compassionate way. A touch of humour and a dose of the occult are woven in, which the reader may take seriously or not.

Henwood’s satirical strength shines when the wellness industry enters the picture. The pages devoted to the main character’s conversations with her boss—the owner of an organic products (or rather, “experiences”) company—are hilarious.

Her most moving prose appears toward the end of the book, when Alzheimer’s and death become part of everyday reality and real pain must be faced in a gracious, unsentimental way. Finally, the author offers the reader one last lifeline with the suggestion that “no one ever leaves this world completely.” You may choose to believe this literally, or simply take it as a comforting metaphor of remembrance.