Recommendations from our site
“This complicated novel which operates at all sorts of different levels, but might be most simply described as a coming-of-age novel. It’s about a boy from provincial Flanders and all the ghosts that haunt him—ghosts from the World Wars, religion, and family disputes that have never been resolved. It’s crazy, picaresque writing. It perhaps doesn’t work all the way through, but nobody could read it and not feel that they had acquired a sense of what Belgium was really about. In that sense, he’s the sort of literary equivalent of the songs of Jacques Brel.” Read more...
Martin Conway, Historian
Our most recommended books
-
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy -
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa -
Aura
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Lysander Kemp -
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky -
Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe
by George Santayana -
Man Tiger: A Novel
by Eka Kurniawan