Roomy Naqvy wrote:
The books that I have recently added including what I got from various warehouses from the US are:
1. Novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Erasers, The Voyeur and Djinn. Robbe-Grillet was French and was known as one of the best exponents of the noveau roman, or the New Novel and is historically slotted in the post World War II period. The links should help:
http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/robbe-grillet.html and
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/grillet.htm 2. Desire, a novel by Hugo Claus. Claus is a renowned Belgian novelist. Link:
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hclaus.htm 3. View of Dawn in the Tropics, a novel by the Cuban novelist, G Cabrera Infante. I have one of his novels called Holy Smoke, which is a history of the cigar. Links:
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=18753 and
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/sougui.html 4. Bread Givers, a novel by Anzia Yezierska. She was a Polish immigrant in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century and describes life while growing up in ghetto situations. I read about her first when we studied an extract for a prose book while in third year college and she stuck in my Pentium chip mind. One of her memorable quotes: “Give a beggar a dime and he'll bless you. Give him a dollar and he'll curse you for withholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom.” She achieved good success. Links:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/culture/literature/Overview_Jewish_American_Literature/Immigrant_Literature/Literature_Anzia_Norton.htm 5. Woodcutters, a novel by Thomas Bernhard. He was a major Austrian voice. Links:
http://www.spikemagazine.com/0299bernhard.php 6. The Messenger, a novel by Mayra Montero. Montero is a Cuban novelist. I have read and have a copy of In the Palm of Darkness, another novel set in Haiti. Links: [interview with Montero]
http://www.bombsite.com/montero/montero.html 7. The Concert, a novel by the Albanian novelist, Ismail Kadare. Broken April is another Kadare novel that I have read and is with me. Links:
http://www.albania.com/famous-albanians/kadare.php and
http://www.albanianliterature.com/html/authors/bio/kadare-i.html 8. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, The Golden Harvest and Jubiaba, three novels by the great Brazilian literary giant, Jorge Amado. I already have his immensely popular novel, which was probably made into a film as well, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Amado and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1477183.stm 9. Tales of the Night, short stories by Peter Hoeg, an important Danish writer. Links:
http://www.mts.net/~mloewen1/smilla/hoeg.html and
http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero/hoeg.html and
http://www.literarymoose.info/literature/hoeg.html 10. This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps and House of Glass are four novels by the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer and they form part of the Buru Quartet that he wrote when he was in prison on the Buru Island. Other books by him which I got recently include The Fugitive and The Mute’s Soliloquy, which is a work of non fiction. He is the winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Links:
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pram.htm and
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1998-03/dissident.html 11. Beyond the Walls, Selected Poems by the eminent Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet. Hikmet, along with Pablo Neruda and Anna Akhtamova was known as a major twentieth century poet. Links:
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=291 and
http://www.anvilpresspoetry.com/hikmet.html and
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hikmet.htm 12. The Sandglass, a novel by the Sri Lankan writer Romesh Gunesekera. Links:
http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Gune.html and
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/gunesekera/sand.htm 13. The Colour of Summer by the Cuban writer, Reinaldo Arenas. I had read one book earlier by him, Before Night Falls, which was his memoir. He is a homosexual writer and reading him for the first time was quite shocking. Links:
http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/0140157654.asp and
http://www.aegis.com/news/ads/1990/AD901414.html and
http://www.magicalrealism.com/authors/9.html 14. Call me Ishmael Tonight, the last collection of poems by the Indian-American poet, Agha Shahid Ali. This collection of poems is a book of ghazals, a poetic form that originated in Persian and Urdu and is exceptionally difficult to work in a different language such as English. In one of his poems, “Country Without a Postoffice”, he says, ‘If only you could have been mine/What could not have been possible in this world?’. Links:
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C070701 and
http://www.nortonpoets.com/alia.htm and
http://www.himalmag.com/march98/encounter.htm [where he says that ‘the earth is a calligraphy of coils’]
Roomy Naqvy
[Edited at 2004-03-07 18:20]
[Edited at 2004-03-07 18:21]
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