books @ cc.

by Orhan Pamuk (1990)

Galip’s wife, Ruya, has suddenly disappeared; suspecting that she has left him for her ex-husband and half-brother, Celal — a popular newspaper columnist who has also vanished mysteriously, Galip embarks on a journey to find them both, obsessively searching for (and drowning in) endless possible meanings and leads.

by Orhan Pamuk (1995)

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

With that hokum-slash-truism, the novel begins the story about Osman, a young student who became obsessed about a book, as well as those who have read it, looking for some sorts of answers, common threads, and comparisons to how the book affects their lives and gives the possibility of a new life (a sentiment shared by many readers, I’m sure).

by Roberto Bolaño (2000)

A first-person narration novella, By Night in Chile is a deathbed confession of Father Urrutia, a.k.a. Father Ibacache, a half-hearted Jesuit priest and literary critic. Set during the transition from Allende to Pinochet, the novella — written in one single paragraph except for the last sentence — paints the turbulent political landscape with particular emphasis on the state, the church, and the literary/artistic figures.

Things: A Story of the ‘60
A Man Asleep
by Georges Perec (1965)

Containing Perec’s two-sides-of-the-same-coin novellas, both Things and A Man Asleep tell the stories of opposing youthful, spiralling indulgences in futile escape from life.

by Roberto Bolaño

Selected from Editorial Anagrama’s collections, the short stories in Last Evenings on Earth were previously published in English in The New Yorker, Grand Street, and Tin House. Written in direct, short sentences, one feels, as Bolaño said (or so according to the book jacket), “the melancholy folklore of exile” pervading these stories.

by Meša Selimović (1966)

Set in Sarajevo circa 18th century, Death and the Dervish is a first-person narrative account by the dervish of the title, Ahmed Nurrudin. A spiritual leader of a tekke, Ahmed — whose name is apparently given (his real name is never revealed, as are all characters in the book except for Hassan) — considers himself unworthy of the title Sheikh and Nuruddin, a man at an “ugly age… young enough to have dreams, but too old to fulfill any of them.”

by Danilo Kiš (1965)

A semi-autobiographical story, Garden, Ashes is a recollection of Andy Scham, a young child living in Hungary during the World War II. Despite the ubiquitous shadows of Holocaust, Kiš’ masterful composition of vivid, precise minutiae of surrounding details and events, with an intense focus on the (eccentric) father, Eduard Scham, Garden, Ashes evokes the densely atmospheric writings of Bruno Schulz in The Street of Crocodiles.

by Danilo Kiš (1983)

A collection of metaphysical short stories set in various times and places, luminously darkened with the themes of fate and death’s impenetrability. With strong political undercurrents and recondite personal insights, Kiš’s reworked facts, Gnostic, Biblical, Koran myths and legends, political situations, rural folktales, depicting the delicate multitude and vicissitude of human life, perhaps with less faux vérité style than A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, yet with the same finely-crafted prose, subtle ironies and detachment that is both powerful and constrained.

by Danilo Kiš (1976)

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich consists of seven different yet casually interlinked short stories about revolutionaries, mostly centering around the Russian Revolution and its blind Stalinist totalitarianism that arbitrarily consumes its children. In its loose labyrinth of characters, loose deeds, occurences and details artfully described, readers find shadows of Borgesian influence. While the literary polemic with Borges is unmistakably deliberate with his faux documentary style (particularly A Universal History of Iniquity), Kiš’ lyrical mastery is all the more remarkably powerful in his detached yet delicate constructions of the grim subjects.

by Orhan Pamuk (1979)

Part meta-, part historical fiction, The White Castle is the story of the narrator (whose name is never revealed), a young Italian savant and his ambivalent relationship with his Turkish double. In 17th century, caught by the Ottoman fleet during his journey from Venice to Naples, the narrator was brought to Istanbul as a slave, yet his various skilled knowledge acquired him better treatment and fame. Summoned to medicate the ailing pasha (and suceeding), he was then dispensed to assist the Hoja — a master-teacher — who could easily pass for his twin.