GatesyRead

  Saga Land  sat on my bookshelf for a few years in a loose queue, and then  I read it all at once, effortlessly and with pleasure. Richard Fidler has teamed up with Icelandic-Australian Kári Gíslason to co-write a narrative that moves between personal story (Gíslason’s search for family and connection to Iceland), mythology (sagas retold with a light touch) and travelogue (shared journeys together across the island).  The chapters are told in the alternate voices of the two authors. Fidler’s voice is empathetic and curious, interweaving retellings of the narrative with connections to the present and Gíslason’s journey from Fidler’s perspective. Gíslason has more at stake in the events of the narrative. He recalls childhood in Iceland, Britain and Australia, and recounts the search for his biological father, both in the past as a young man, and now in the present through his step-brothers and step-sisters, and the famous Iceland genealogical records. The story develops these themes wit

  I picked this book up at Schiphol Airport on a wayward flight that took me from Hamburg to Lyon via Amsterdam. I had just finished reading Martin Amis’   The Zone of Interest   and I was promised something lighter: the road trip of a young man (Jay Parini) and an ancient writer (Jorge Luis Borges). The setting is the Scottish highlands, though first we meet a mature J. Parini, now a successful writer living in Vermont (1986). Memories of his life-changing time studying at St Andrews in Scotland surface when Parini hears of the great author’s death. He casually mentions his youthful journals, which presumably lie behind the details and anecdotes in the account. The blurb at the back describes Borges and Me as a “classic road novel, based on true events”. Most of it rings true; though the brief affair with the Nordic Ailith on the remote Orkney Islands reads like wishful thinking. The story proper begins in 1970. New Yorker Parini has escaped the draft by relocating to St Andrews in

  When I first visited Prague in November 1995, the ghostly presence of the Cold War seemed to linger in the wintry setting, the quiet streets after dark, and the strange shuffling, secretive habits of the owner of the apartment I was renting. And yet it was also very much apart from a decade earlier, when Philip Roth published The Prague Orgy (1985) and the Cold War was in the middle of a charged resurgence. I recently re-read this book and felt not nostalgia but horror. Imagine an era of secret police, disappearances, authoritarian power and personal fear. Yes, it hasn’t entirely gone away from the world at large (Russia, China, Iran) – even if Wenceslas Square is now a place of tourism and high street shopping. In this novella, Roth continues with the character of Nathan Zuckerman, a successful America novelist and protagonist of three earlier works of fiction ( The Ghost Writer [1979], Zuckerman Unbound [1981], The Anatomy Lesson [1984]). The setting is 1976. Zuckerman agrees t