Tawada takes us through Anh’s story in thirteen chapters, each titled after a different Deneuve movie. And it’s not just about Deneuve, her movies serve as a vehicle for all the other things that seem to be happening in novel—escapism, allegorical references to communism, kidnapping, subjugation, sexual ambiguity and a fair amount of resigned desperation.
Reading Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole is like being lost in someone else’s nightmare where there are no exits. Karinthy creates an existential version of hell, stunning the reader not by blatant displays of horrifying circumstances, but by a gradual series of small failures that defeat and degrade the narrator and the reader.
Amanda Michalopoulou was born in Athens in 1966. In Athens, she studied French Literature and then went to Paris to study journalism. In 1993, she entered a short story in Revmata magazine’s literature competition and won the award. Since then she has received numerous scholarships for literary residencies in Germany, France, the United States, and Switzerland. She has received several literary awards throughout her career for her novels, short story collections, and children’s books.
The Four Books chronicles the time of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and also sardonically includes the use of red blossoms as rewards for good deeds based on Mao Zedong Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956) that promoted open expression of the regime in order to let intellectual ideas flourish.
Jonke tackles the philosophical questions of literature and art and how the artist struggles between the importance of the word and the importance of what the word represents.