All Forms of Art

  South of the Border, West of the Sun  was not at all one of my favorites.  After reading so many glowing reviews, I must confess I was genuinely disappointed.  That said, I didn’t stop reading. Not even once. And that, in itself, says a lot about Haruki Murakami as a writer. I didn’t enjoy the book until very close to the end, but Murakami’s prose kept pulling me forward. He has that rare ability to make you continue reading even when you feel, deep down, that the story might be going nowhere. Beautiful Writing, Distant Characters Murakami writes beautifully—there’s no denying that. His sentences flow effortlessly, scenes are carefully composed, and everything feels precise and intentional. But I felt no empathy for Hajime, the main character. I couldn’t identify with him, nor did I particularly care about what happened to him. And it’s hard to love a story when you don’t care about the people living inside it. This emotional distance reminded me, at times, of ...

  When the Ordinary World Turns Hostile Marie NDiaye ’s My Heart Hemmed In begins like a domestic drama and slowly turns into a psychological nightmare.  Nadia, a teacher in Bordeaux, suddenly finds herself shunned by everyone — neighbors, coworkers, even her husband. She has no idea why, and neither do we. It’s a setup that feels almost Kafkaesque — think The Trial or The Metamorphosis — where the real horror isn’t monsters or ghosts, but society itself turning inexplicably against you. A Hall of Mirrors Like in Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, NDiaye dives deep into a woman’s unraveling mind, showing how fear distorts perception until reality itself becomes unreliable. Nadia’s paranoia grows, her body reacts in strange ways, and the city around her feels charged with invisible hostility. Reading it feels like being caught between a dream and a panic attack — much like Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, where logic keeps slipping just out of reach. Language That...

I decided to loosely translate this book’s title myself because it’s an interesting novel by the Portuguese author João Ricardo Pedro and hasn’t been translated into English. It definitely should be, though. The Context Much of Portuguese literature is marked by the oppressive government, the so-called “New State,” and this is one more such book.  The difference is that it isn’t about that time period, but rather about the following decades and how the political police and the lack of development the dictatorship gave the Portuguese people influenced the next generations. 3 Generations The book is about a family, telling us stories from 3 different generations, all of whom are somehow marked by the dictatorship and the colonial war.  The ones who lived it as adults, the ones who lived it as children, and the ones who just heard stories about it. All of them had their lives shaped by this reality. An Average Portuguese Family We have Chronicles about a t...

A strangely captivating novel I didn’t expect to love so much Picking Up a Book I Knew Nothing About I found The Book of Illusions completely by accident—pulled it off my parents-in-law’s shelf because the title looked mysterious enough. Honestly, I didn’t expect much.  The first pages were interesting and well written, sure, but I didn’t think it would be the sort of novel that hijacks your entire afternoon. Spoiler: it absolutely did. A Tragedy So Heavy You Almost Want to Look Away Auster opens the book with a heartbreak so intense that it almost feels unfair to read about it. Your first reaction might be exactly that: This isn’t fair. David Zimmer, the protagonist, has been shattered by loss. And then, in a way only Auster can pull off, Zimmer begins to crawl out of his despair through the oddest possible gateway: a sudden obsession with a forgotten silent-film comedian named Hector Mann. It’s such a strange setup—but somehow it works. Falling Down the Ra...

The Discreet Hero is a  2013 book that was translated to English in 2015. The writer  Mario Vargas Llosa  won the Nobel Prize  for literature in 2010. An Unconventional Hero In The Discreet Hero, the protagonist Felício Yanaqué lives his life according to his father's last teaching “Do not let anyone step into you.” as a way to honor his memory. But life is tricky and Felício's principles will be put to the test. An unconventional hero  without the dramatic overtones of the movies but filled with honor, Felício is a real-life hero, one who no one will ever know about. Yet, they can proudly shape their own destiny with honesty. Our protagonist fights against the  status quo , which he thinks is wrong, and never gives up, although  the world around him keeps saying that this is the rule. Two Stories, One Fate But Felício is not the only hero in this book. Along with its pages, we can read two different storylines, unrelated at first...