The OF Blog: Mexican and Turkish Book Porn

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Mexican and Turkish Book Porn


These two recent arrivals hail respectively from Mexico and Turkey. The first is Jorge Volpi's just-released short novel/fable, El jardín devastado. It mixes aphorisms on the human condition with some very real (and sometimes disturbing events) taking place in Kirkuk, Iraq and elsewhere in the world. It more than lived up to my expectations and I'll have more to say on it in December.

The second book arrived today and is the 2008 translation of Turkish author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's famous 1949 novel, A Mind at Peace. Very curious to see how this will read in translation, as Turkish literature is something that I am mostly ignorant of at the time being (well, outside of My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk).

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