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by László Krasznahorkai (1989)

A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the whole world, arrives in the dead of winter in a small town in Hungary, prompting bizarre rumors.

by Arthur Koestler (1940)

A fictional account of a show trial during Stalin’s 1930s purges, Rubashov, the protagonist, once a revolutionary disillusioned by the regime, is abducted, jailed, tortured (psychologically) and finally confessed to a series of “counter-revolutionary” crimes he didn’t commit, for the ideals of the Revolution.

by Kobo Abe (1966).

A scientist whose face has been disfigured in a laboratory explosion, penned his thoughts and confessions for his wife.

by Cesare Pavese (1948). Three young men, being young, nocturnal, and bored, met Poli, who has all the money to indulge in his whims. No purpose of existence, achievements, feeling wasted, women, drugs here and there, hunting, the usual.

by Kate DiCamillo, Bagram Ibatoulline (illustrator).
A cliché and formulaic story of a vain, indifferent, very finely-crafted china rabbit who “has never felt love”, suddenly finds himself lost, away from all comforts he has previously taken for granted. Pretty illustrations though.

by José Saramago (1991).

Here’s a gospel where Jesus is a very common human being without a priori divinity if confused, pessimistic and guilt-ridden, an unwilling “restive lamb that resists being taken to be sacrificed”. He is unsure of himself, plagued with nightmares and guilt passed down by his deceased father, aghast at the power he chanelled and at the inescapable covenant with the power-hungry God.

by Witold Gombrowicz (1937)

A madcap comic parody about a 30-year-old dragged back to secondary school, where everyone believes him as another poseur juvenile, “inclined to pose in order to appear grown up”.

by Primo Levi

Narrative is contained within another narrative in this novel, as Faussone, an exuberant rigger, tells his stories of working to a chemist-writer narrator (no doubt Levi’s alter ego):his constructions, an adventurous monkey, a machine that caught stardust, a name gone wrong, overcoming the fear of water, from India, Russia to Alaska.

A young, unnamed emissary is dispatched by the Bishop of Iceland “to conduct the most important investigation at that world-famous mountain since the days of Jules Verne”, i.e. to investigate em> Kristinihald undir Jökli, Christianity under the glacier.

Conjugal Loveby Alberto Moravia

During (and a few decades after) the wars Moravia was probably the most widely-known Italian novelist in English-speaking countries. The Conformist and Contempt have been made into films by Bertolucci and Godard. Then there’s also the friendship with Pasolini. Yet these days one (at least in English-speaking world) hardly heard of him, jostled by popular favourites such as Eco and Calvino.