0720 | The Underdogs | Mariano Azuela
If this didn’t influence Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, I’d be surprised. Azuela’s sparse prose and depiction of individuals caught up in events and landscape that they have little control over…
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0666 | The Labyrinth of Solitude | Octavio Paz
This is for die-hard fans of literature really. Very philosophical, this collection of essays wasn’t my cup of tea at all despite whatever place it may hold in Latin America…
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0603 | The Savage Detectives | Roberto Bolaño
The Guardian describes this as a “a shaggy dog story.” Merriam-Webster defines that as “of, relating to, or being a long-drawn-out circumstantial story concerning an inconsequential happening that impresses the…
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0590 | The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow
Another Bellow, another fellow. This time it’s Augie, a Jewish kid from the ghetto who we follow entirely randomly as he grows and flows out into the world and all…
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0580 | Vernon God Little | DBC Pierre
Pierre’s adventure tale of the pursuit of poor little Vern by virtually the entire machine of ‘Merica is a combustive mix of satire and suspense. The pace doesn’t let up….
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0540 | 2666 | Roberto Bolaño
Dear Lord, spare me. Another title from Latin/South America and yet another novel that I could have done without. What the heck is it with that continent that I just…
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0511 | U.S.A. | John Dos Passos
My what a splendid book this is. Vast in its scope and magnanimous in its treatment of the varied strata that made up a nation coming to terms with the…
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0502 | Like Water for Chocolate | Laura Esquivel
I’ve never been inspired by novels written either by South American authors or set in South America. However, Esquivel is Mexican, and as that’s very definitely part of North America, she didn’t fall…
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0501 | Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy
An absolutely harrowing novel that makes you feel like you yourself have spent months tramping around the arid wastelands of what is now the US-Mexican borderland. It’s the kind of…
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0431 | All the Pretty Horses | Cormac McCarthy
This novel is probably the most evocative I think I’ve read out of North America. Hauntingly beautiful, tragic and yet reassuring too, the Texan and Mexican landscape lives and breathes…
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0328 | Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry
Context: As I was struggling to reach the end of this, I finally got myself a practice amp for my guitar. REVIEW When I bought this in second hand bookshop…
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0220 | The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
Context: Read this as our landlady’s pumpkin decayed slowly in the garden. REVIEW Hard-hitting crime writing doesn’t come much better written than this. Ellroy takes up where writers like Chandler…
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0204 | Do You Know What You’re Doing Lord? – Carol Anderson
Context: Finished this off as the wife was cleaning jewellery which had gone mouldy whilst in storage in Papua New Guinea. REVIEW In the missionary-lore of Papua New Guinea, the…