"The translation is pleasingly idiomatic, the translator's introduction illuminating. Perec's yarn, though, will largely be of interest to students of postwar French literature and social history, who will find that it makes a nice if not especially memorable puzzle."
"Leonardo is dead, Antonello is dead, and I'm not feeling too well myself." Thus we read in French experimentalist Perec's long-forgotten, rejected debut, now rescued from the dustbin of literary history.
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"It's an original approach to an old story many times retold; a song sung in an eloquently expressive voice, both agelessly familiar and refreshingly new."
In his classic study The Singer of Tales (1960), eminent scholar Albert Lord demonstrated strong links between the twin Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey and the tradition of oral storytelling continued even into the 20th century in numerous European and Asian cultures, notably those of the Balkan countries.
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"A worthy addition to Holocaust literature, evoking the sweetness of one life lost and reminding us with urgent clarity how inexorably it was swept under those tragic times."
The journal of a bright young woman who was among the many French Jews funneled through Drancy, the Parisian collection camp, to Nazi death camps.
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"'Agamemnon's Daughter' is negligible. But Kadare is a great writer, and 'The Blinding Order' in particular is not to be missed."
A miscellany showcasing earlier work by the Albanian author (Elegy for Kosovo, 2000, etc.) and recipient of the first Man Booker International Prize.
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"Vargas has created a notably intriguing policeman in Adamsberg (Have Mercy on Us All, 2005), whose story this time draws you in and keeps you guessing until the dazzling dénouement."
The inhabitants of the Alpes-Maritimes region of France live in fear as sheep and humans alike are ravaged by what appears to be an enormous wolf.
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"Captivating characters, historical oddities and clever plotting all add up to a scintillating tale. Mystery fans will be avidly seeking more from Vargas (Seeking Whom He May Devour, not reviewed, etc.)."
A French bestseller wonders whether modern Paris is in for another round of the plague.
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"Echoes of Kafka, Koestler, Camus and Orwell, in a master novelist's blackest and most bracing report yet from Communist Cloud-Cuckoo-Land."
Recent Balkan history is reshaped with mordant wit in this wry 2003 parable—the 11th novel in English translation from the renowned Albanian author (The Pyramid, 1996, etc.).
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"He's an earnest and impassioned rebel against Communist (in fact, all) authority; unfortunately, he's also a lot less interesting than the serpent and its bride."
The newest (2000) from the internationally renowned Albanian author of Elegy for Kosovo (2000) and The Three-Arched Bridge (1998) consists of two separate, very unequal stories.
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"A must for any library—and a wonderful gift for anthropologists, ethnographers, cultural historians, and quiz kids."
Ifrah's monumental follow-up to From One to Zero (1993) goes from one to (almost) infinity as he meticulously reviews the numbers and reckoning systems of countless tribes and cultures in a dazzling scholarly performance.
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"Even in its inchoate state (smoothed out by fellow 'Oulipo' experimentalists Mathews and Roubaud), Perec's dazzling gamesmanship offers sophisticated pleasures reminiscent of, and often equal to, the legacies bequeathed to us by his masters Joyce and Nabokov."
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