Archive for the ‘Spain’ Category

THE ANGEL’S GAME by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It must be extremely difficult for an author to write a brilliant, literary bestseller and then have to deal with the expectations of a worldwide audience waiting for him/her to do as well, or even better, with the next novel. I congratulate Carlos Ruiz Zafon on his latest offering, The Angel’s Game, a superb work of fiction where magical realism meets gothic horror and romance. Ruiz Zafon pays homage to the art of writing, and to such authors as Charles Dickens, who wrote Great Expectations, a book which plays an important role here, as well as to Charlotte BrontГ«, with her Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, the couple who gave “Gothic” its name. The reader enters a world which on the surface seems normal, however, there are many elements at play which are magical, illogical and often disturbing.

June 15, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Award Winning Author, Beyond Reality, Literary, Mystery/Suspense, Spain  No Comments

WONDERFUL WORLD by Javier Calvo

Filled with the fragmentation, incoherence and ambiguity that typify much of post-modernist thought, Wonderful World is a challenge for the reader, since the very characteristics which make it “post-modern” are also characteristics which are off-putting for readers who expect a novel to have a clear beginning, middle, and end. And when that novel is almost five hundred pages long, the challenges are even more daunting, since it is difficult to know how much of the incoherence and fragmentation is deliberate and how much may be the result of less than rigorous editing.

May 31, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Debut Novel, Experimental Fiction, Spain  No Comments