life without a plot

Not a Torchwood post. Shocking, I know. I'm surprised, too.



Books. Which I read. No, seriously. (Jan. & Feb.-ish)


Feridun Zaimoglu, Leyla

Liked it a lot, although I was perhaps more seduced by the prose than by the story itself, and somehow, after more than a month I find that not too much remains that I want to write about...


Perihan Mağden, The Messenger Boy Murders

Strangest book I've read in a long while. Charming, memorable, couldn't make sense of it at all. I'm not sure there is one. A bit surreal, dream-like. But I like her writing and wish more of her work was translated.


Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

( fascinating )


Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, Verbotene Lieben

Turkish novel originally from 1900 which I picked up because of a very favourable SPIEGEL review; Interesting psychology and characters, very fin de siècle. But on the whole too exclusively driven by romantic relationships to really draw me in.


D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

( Started out liking it, ended up disliking it strongly, and shouldn't E.M.Forster get credit for the plot? )


Vladimir Sorokin, Der Tag des Opritschniks

Shocking. Fascinating. By turns horrifying and funny. I'm not that intimately familiar with what is currently happening in Russia, so I there may be more specific jabs and bits of satire that I've missed, but if so it didn't take away anything from the book. I'm not usually a fan of first person narrators, but in this case it's the perfect choice: the book is only 220 pages long and covers not even 24 hours, but by the end of it you're thoroughly immersed, and while the brutality and perversion are still shocking on one level, one has already started to see them through the narrator's eyes and regard them as something almost normal, and it's frightening to experience how fast this happens... Definitely recommended, and I'd be very much tempted to immediately check out more of his work if I hadn't already such a very long backlog reading list...