Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

In our modern western culture we – women and men alike – claim for ourselves the right to be the architects of our individual future… and happiness, but it’s a rather recent achievement even for us. During the greater part of history here too the lives of people were by and large determined by others, notably by fathers, feudal lords, priests, Kings or Queens, and by seldom questioned unwritten rules. Individual happiness mattered very little, romantic love was of no importance in marriage matters. In Mexico of the early twentieth century the protagonist of Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel is supposed to willingly uphold tradition that demands of her as the youngest daughter to put last her own longing for happiness in marriage and to take care of her mother until she dies. Love is stronger than tradition, though, and the girl’s passion for cooking accompanies her on her painful and long way to empowerment.

Book Review: The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

2016 review of a book written

by an author whose family name starts with the letter

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

For westerners like me India is a country of marvels very similar to the fairy-tale world of Arabian Nights – ancient India of the Taj Mahal that is because globalisation is gradually levelling all cultural differences of everyday life. The world of the Indian Moguls or Mughals, the descendants of the great Mongolian ruler Genghis Khan in India, is particularly fascinating and together with Renaissance Florence, which prospered under Medici rule, it serves as setting for the historical novel The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. The story surrounds the Mughal Princess Qara Köz who has such powerful black eyes that everybody falls under her spell. She becomes the mistress of Persian Shah Ismail and then Lord Argalia, commander of the Ottoman Janissaries, who takes her with him on his flight from the Sultan’s executioners in Stamboul to his home town of Florence. But the sixteenth century is a time of superstition and of witch-hunts…

Book Review: Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez

Love is a very powerful emotion that can overwhelm even the strongest and most disciplined character, especially when it comes by surprise and for the first time. Love always feels like magic, but sometimes it appears to the outsider as if a potent spell has been cast on the lovers or only one of them. When the passion is so strong that it becomes harmful and destructive to the people concerned, it isn’t a long way to think that a demon must be at work. This is what happens in the historical novel Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez set in a time when and a place where superstition was common. It tells a story of first love under particularly unfavourable circumstances and between a most unlikely couple, namely between a scarcely adolescent girl alleged of being possessed by demons and her already middle-aged exorcist in an eighteenth-century sea town somewhere in South America.

Book Review: A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

When after many years an old friend turns up from nowhere all of a sudden, be it in person or through an object or words reviving the memory of him or her, it can be a joyful, an unpleasant or even a disturbing experience. This is because such an unexpected reapparition usually evokes a past long done with, maybe almost forgotten or not voluntarily remembered. Sometimes it also gives rise to speculations about what the friend has been up to during all those years out of sight and about the reasons why s/he emerges just now. In A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami a letter from a friend of his youth known by the sobriquet “Rat” and the photo of a sheep herd on a mountain pasture send the nameless narrator off into a big adventure on a mysterious farm in Northern Hokkaidō.

Book Review: Heart of Tango by Elia Barceló

Tango is not just a very passionate Latin-American dance that fascinates aficionados all around the world, but in a way it represents life itself with all its ups and downs, above all love and pain. For this week’s review I chose a novel in which tango serves to magically link the fates of two sets of people living at different times and in different places. Heart of Tango by Elia Barceló is at the same time the unusual story of the modern-day tango lovers Rodrigo and Milena who seize any opportunity to dance tango in their scarce free time and who are unknowingly involved into the tragic events which the tango passion of Natalia and Diego brought about through the hands of Natalia’s husband Rojo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1920.

Book Review: The Return of the Caravels by António Lobo Antunes

This week I was in the mood for Portuguese literature and decided to review a book by António Lobo Antunes. My first choice was Tratado das Paixões da Alma (Treatise on the Passions of the Soul), but as so often I was annoyed to find that it hasn’t been translated into English. Easter just past (or ahead in the Orthodox Christian Churches) it would have felt odd to talk about a book half set on Christmas Eve, so I ruled out The Splendor of Portugal. At last I turned towards The Return of the Caravels by António Lobo Antunes which offers a delirious fusion of Portugal’s rise to and fall as a colonial power between the sixteenth century and 1974. The seedy old colonists who return to Lisbon after many decades away are at the same time the former discoverers and great names of Portuguese history.

Book Review: Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

With today’s review I stay in the rut that I entered past Friday with a collection of fairy-tale-like short stories from the early 1940s (»»» read my review of Winter’s Tales by Isak Dinesen) and that now takes me to a work of magical realism with epic dimensions first published forty years later in 1983. With its over 600 pages Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin must be called monumental, if not lengthy, compared to the concise tales of the Danish almost-laureate of the Nobel Prize which carry nearly the same title borrowed from William Shakespeare. Mark Helprin’s story of the foundling Peter Lake and the white stallion Athansor builds a magical bridge between New York at the beginning and at the end of the twentieth century as well as between the realms of the living and of the dead to restore ultimate justice.

Book Review: Winter’s Tales by Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen)

The award of a literary prize usually implies that others who would deserve it just as much or even more get nothing. It goes without saying that among the unlucky losers of the Nobel Prize in Literature there have been several women writers, too. Eliza Orzeszkowa (»»» read my portrait of her) and Concha Espina (»»» read my review of The Metal of the Dead) were two of them and for today’s review I chose a short story collection of another almost-laureate of the Nobel Prize, namely Winter’s Tales by Isak Dinesen aka Karen Blixen. Having been nominated for it several times and on the shortlist of 1961 (together with Graham Greene, John Steinbeck and the winner Ivo Andrić), the Danish author might have outdone John Steinbeck in 1962, hadn’t she died in September, thus before the official announcements in October.