books @ cc.

by Gilbert Adair (1992)

An short and engaging thriller, The Death of the Author is a satirical story about a literary pretensions and bombast. Léopold Sfax, a Frenchman who emigrated to the United States, is a prominent literary academia who wrote “The Theory”, a variation of by now an all too familiar deconstructionism.

by Georges Perec (1969)

Born out of a self-imposed formalist grid of lipogram, A Void is essentially a parody of thriller and noir fiction, loaded with plots and subplots, pursuits, vengeance and grim conclusions, amazingly engrossing and well-written despite the missing ‘e’ letter throughout the whole novel.

by Georges Perec (1975)

A book of two alternating texts, one (written in italics) an imaginary adventure story, “an arbitrary but careful reconstruction of a childhood fantasy about a land in thrall to the Olympic ideal”; the other consisting of autobiographic fragments of wartime childhood “made up of scattered oddments, gaps, lapses, doubts, guesses and meagre anecdotes.”

by Georges Perec (1978)

A quilt of stories of inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block, frozen in time the moment the protagonist (if he may be called so) Bartlebooth, dies. The layered stories are interwoven with hundreds of lives, minutiae of details, literary and historical allusions, written with self-imposed constraints, resulting in an encyclopaedic work that is not just fascinating in its richness and masterful construction, but also beautiful, ordinary, bizarre, moving, and heart-wrenching.

by Felisberto Hernández

One reads Hernández’ stories feeling as if drifting through fluid, phantasmagorical trance, animistic worlds where everyday objects take a life of their own, eliciting delicate forgotten responses, thoughts, feelings and memories. There are fifteen stories in this book, three of which are slightly longer pieces (The Stray Horse, The Daisy Dolls, The Flooded House), all of them inevitably in one way or another relate to a piano.

by Nathanael West (1939)

Set in Hollywood in the era of the Great Depression, The Day of the Locust is a short but painful satire of the visions of American disillusioned dreams and fantasy factory. Todd Hackett, a talented set-designer, drifts through a city deliberately reduced to its most base depiction of failed dreams and false glitters, peopled with characters plucked out straight from tabloids and noir-ish B-grade movies

by Knut Hamsun (1890)

A poor, emaciated writer, unable to afford a rent (but with too big of an ego), roams the city, his state of mind and physique heavily disoriented by his hunger. Tragically impulsive, he swings from one grandiose, “dignified” idea and perception to the next, only to regret and to chastise himself in between, encountering misadventures, “imagining things” and suspecting everything, making up lies which deprive him further of any help, desperately and painfully clinging to his “intellectual vanity”, e.g. refusing to admit himself as a vagrant at the police station (saying instead that he’s a journalist on a wild night out), which lost him the free meals he so badly needed.

by Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)

A renowned Moscow scientist (surgeon), Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky, with his assistant Ivan Arnoldovich Bromenthal, implanted the pituitary’s gland and the testes of a recently dead criminal into a stray dog, Sharik, with the unexpected result of Sharik turning into a complete human, a caricature stereotype of a boorish and stupid proletarian spouting revolutionary slogans (Engels & Kautsky) he doesn’t understand.

by Donna Tartt (1992)

A scholarship student, Richard, upon arriving at the exclusive Hampden College at Vermont, was intrigued by a (sophistry-exuding,) tightly-knit group of privileged Greek students with, well, yes, a dark secret. Written in a confessional, retrospective manner by Richard, the narrative is engaging, never giving too much, although in the first place it never strives to hide its intentions, rather enjoying recalling after the facts.

The murder-amidst-rich-bourgeois-college-kids plot might turn off those loathe to standard American teenage thriller, and yes, at its heart The Secret History is a thriller (albeit a well-written one) suitable if you’re looking for a light entertainment page-turner. I can’t help thinking it’s almost like a cross between Love in Thoughts and Lord of the Flies.

A Novel
by Ma Jian (1993)

Every week a wealthy ‘professional blood donor’, Vlazerim, visits his friend, Sheng, a disillusioned, ‘idealistic’ writer, bringing a wide array of food and drink (that ‘cost twice as much as the professional writer’s monthly wage’) they’d gobble down while they ‘pour their hearts out to each other, insult and curse each other’. The writer has been commissioned by the Party to write a propagandistic novel on Lei Feng, tempted by an offer for an entry to The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers in return, but all that comes to mind are ‘the characters of his unwritten novel: a young entrepreneur who runs a private crematorium; an illegal migrant who writes letters for the illiterate; a father who spends his life trying to get rid of his retarded daughter…’