Tag: Books

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: 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.

Books: What We Can Know, A Novel by Ian McEwan, 2025

The novel offers variations of all possible answers to the question “What can we know?” The answers, as expected, are pessimistic. In a world overwhelmed with data and a digital cloud heavy with “knowledge” about everyone and everything, it is still possible to manipulate memory and history as we struggle to “know”. “Most of life is oblivion,” one of McEwan’s characters argues. The truth about the past is unattainable, as it is controlled by the living and by what they have decided to pass on. We can’t know ourselves or what we are capable of. Memoirs are misleading as we put our “better selves” on the page. In a dystopian post-catastrophic world, an age metaphorically named by McEwan – the Inundation (think climate change of catastrophic proportions), humanities and history are losing the attention of the young. The generation of the future is obsessed with the present. Still, a nostalgic professor from the 22nd century searches for a lost poem recited at a birthday party in 2014. This search reflects the author’s hope that literature will still matter…

While the first part of the novel takes place in the future and centers on the search for the lost poem, the second is a soliloquy of the woman to whom the poem was dedicated. It is the more captivating and emotionally engaging part. Here, the novel becomes a satire of sorts of a poet-genius and his literary circle. The poet suffers from “status anxiety” and “limited forgiveness for humankind,” and McEwan so detests him that he turns him into a murderer. Or did he have to do this because he needed to introduce some thriller element to his otherwise quite essayistic narrative?

Stylistically, McEwan is at the height of his craft; his message is melancholic and ironic.

Books: Heart the Lover, A Novel by Lily King, 2025

What an exquisite tear-jerker, impossible not to love! It is the perfect story about a love triangle, the choices we make in our youth, and the blurred line between love and friendship…

The novel follows three college friends, all passionately devoted to literature. It abounds in literary references as the characters spar, debate, crack jokes, and dissect their lives in an effort to impress one another. The narrator is in love with a boy whose closest friend is also in love with her. The first relationship eventually collapses, and the friend becomes her lover. He fathers a child with her but does not learn of it until his deathbed. He dies holding her hand, while her former boyfriend keeps vigil nearby. Stripped down to its bare plot, the story could easily sound like a soap opera. Yet one quickly realizes that “soap” does not define a novel as long as it is not part of its expression.

The reader gets immersed in the story of the girl as it is told by her – a reflection on growing up, a sensual narrative full of happy moments, dominated by the anticipation of happiness and future fulfilment that is only possible in youth, as well as by pain—pain that youth alone allows us to overcome. Even as the novel ends with death, the reverse perspective on time lived has a healing effect.

The entire book is illuminated by a line from The Aeneid, quoted twice: “Someday we will remember even these hardships with pleasure.” That very pleasure flows through the narrative, making the novel so profoundly moving.

Books: The Names, A Novel by Florence Knapp, 2025

The novel is celebrated as a remarkable debut… How is the quality of a book relevant to whether it is a first or a last one? It is also praised for being “original” – precisely the quality that it lacks. One can easily detect how it was planned and designed (or rather concocted) to achieve the effect it has on part of the female reading public. One can hardly imagine a male having any interest in this book.

Its “scheme” is so transparent that it is offensive….It is a novel that could be AI-generated or could be a product of a young achiever who just completed her Creative Writing class with an A+. It demonstrates certain skills on a sentence level. As a whole, it is simplistic and schematic. Its premise is preposterous – the different names a woman can select for her son determine his fortune. The first choice is the name of the abusive father, Gordon, the second is Julian, preferred by the mother, and the third is Bear, picked by the child’s sister. Predictably, the wildest choice leads to the happiest life story, while the name “Gordon” dooms the bearer of this name.

Obviously, the book is about the choices a woman can make to set herself free from an abusive marriage. How many more books can the female audience digest and laud that tackle abusive marriages? What does the book add to the artistic interpretation or psychological analysis of the issue? I can’t see the point. But this is the damage that the book club culture and creative writing classes have brought upon literature. Anyone who can read and write thinks that “there is a book in me”. The book clubs brainwash the potential reader with mediocre standards where everyone can “relate” to plots and characters using their own experience. No one has ever taught them that books are not to be judged from “experience”.

In addition, the whole notion of “female writing” – who came up with this nonsense? But now it has become like a self-fulfilled bad prophecy! There is now a “female writing” called to life, and it is bad. Did Mary Shelley write like a woman? No and no!

The book clubs and their followers created trends where books like “Flow Like a River” and “Where the Crawdads Sing” became the standard of female writing. Books where woman is one with nature and nature is one with woman…The funny thing is that these writers are thought to be “feminist” while they are promoting and reinforcing the most patriarchal trope of womanhood – the “nurturer”, the “earth”, the “procreator”. And because these books are successful, they become the model for future creative writing students to perpetuate that trend. How very annoying!

Books: Flesh, A Novel by David Szalay, 2025

Somewhat disappointing for a Booker-nominated novel! But aren’t they all recently?

Szalay tracks in a coldly observant style the life of a boy from behind the Iron Curtain who is sexually abused by a 40-something woman, the age of his mother. The boy becomes obsessed with the older woman, which leads to the accidental murder of her husband. From now on, things go downhill for the main character – although on the surface, his life trajectory is quite successful, financially, socially, and sexually. We follow Istvan, who leads a life as an “out of body” experience, unable to fully engage emotionally with his female partners. On the other hand, we see him capable of deep hatred – towards his stepson, and deep love – towards his own child. Istvan is not just an unsympathetic character. He develops into quite a monstrous person, and despite his overwhelming unhappiness, he never appeals to the compassion of the reader.

If Szalay’s intention was to show the effects of a totalitarian society and its sexually and socially frustrating system on a generation of people who got to experience the collapse of this system, the result is quite unsatisfactory. Istvan’s story could be anybody’s story. The author seems to have little, if any, knowledge of life behind the Iron Curtain.

If Szalay’s intention was to show the effects of childhood sexual trauma on the life of an innocent boy, this has already been done by Ian McEwan in “Lessons” (2022) in a most brilliant way.

Books: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Novel by Satoshi Yagisawa

What is the appeal of a Japanese novel of 150 pages that makes it an international bestseller? The novel is very unpretentious and uneventful with a very light plot and still a page-turner.

The narrative takes you through the ordinary lives of ordinary people with a low horizon of expectations from life – nothing beyond love, work, and family. A hike in the mountains is described so simply and effortlessly that it has the effect of a still-life painting. It focuses your gaze and sucks you into the reality of the everyday made to look mysterious and strange through the power of language. It makes the coolness of the night breeze or the fatigue and excitement of a mountain climb acquire a fresh deep meaning.

There is a lot of melodrama but it is so mellow and tender that creates a sub-genre of its own. Let us call it – the mellow-drama. The painful is combined with hope, death is not an end.