Romanian Literature: A European Topos March 2019, Romanian Cultural Institute, London The first day of the London Book Fair gives the impression of a stage being set: actors of varying sizes and shapes, still not entirely sure of the roles they’re about to play, float around like moths carrying bu
Fri, 22 March, 6:30pm – 8:30pm, Caravansérail Bookshop, 5 Cheshire Street, London E2 6ED. Tickets £5, book here How do you choose which language to write in, if you inhabit two or three cultures? Perhaps a language chooses you… How do you make yourself feel at home between languages that diffe
A teenage girl, eyes glinting, fixes the camera with a quizzical gaze. The young Magda Szirtes manages to combine youthful purity with a knowing air. And it is her alluring image – reproduced on the front of my review copy – and her embattled existence in times of both cataclysm and peace that f
The Last Day is essentially a set of thought experiments, in which an individual is pitted against the strictures of society, human existence and even human biology. In the title story, a ‘madman’ starts printing an eight-million-volume work containing ‘the dates of the deaths of everybody on
Fleur Jaeggy’s fictions are often about lonely, adolescent girls and their dysfunctional families, and Proleterka follows this pattern. Beautifully nuanced and quietly mesmerising, and expertly translated by Alastair McEwan, the novel opens with the death of one father and ends with another’s un
