Elena Ferrante’s novel The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth and final novel in her Neopolitan series, has made the final five shortlist for Italy’s Premio Strega prize – and not without controversy. Ferrante was first nominated for Italy’s biggest prize 23 years ago, with her first novel L’amore molesto (Troubling Love). It didn’t […]
The prize-winning Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria has, apparently, decided to pack in her career writing books after having discovered that more copies of it had been illegally downloaded than had actually been sold. Etxebarria, whose first book was a biography of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and who has won both the Premio Nadal and the […]
Milan Kundera’s ‘The Curtain’ is a collection of essays exploring the history and art of the novel, which reads very much like a Milan Kundera novel.
The publication of Umberto Eco’s latest novel (in Italian), Il cimitero di Praga(The Cemetery of Prague), has created no small amount of controversy in Italy, thanks largely to very public criticisms voiced by the Vatican backed Osservatore Romano newspaper, and the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni . Eco, who made his literary debut […]
One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) – squibs, memoranda, appreciations of […]
Daisy Godwin’s lament about the lack of redmption in so many of today’s novels – made whilst chairing the Orange Prize judging panel – put her in good company. Samuel Johnson famously endorsed Nahum Tate‘s sugar coated revision of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The play had been too bleak, by far, for a Restoration audience, prompting Tate […]
TMO interview with Premio Strega winning Italian novelist Paolo Giordano “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked […]
Novelist and short-story writer Michel Faber, in his three monkeys interview, commented “I think it’s juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren’t real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.” This is […]
It seems like a good year and a half since I’ve read a novel that didn’t involve a writer writing a novel, so I started Domenico Starnone’s First Execution wearily, almost out of duty – despite the fact that the original Italian version of the book comes highly recommended. It has though, thus far (I’m […]
“If the general climate is bad, all will be affected by it. Men and women of letters are not expected to do more than they can, as they express this bad situation in their literary production. With respect to the question of the appeal of a particular work, the whole thing depends on whether the […]
