Tag: nobel

Paradise —By Abdulrazak Gurnah

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Book Review

Rating: 4 out of 5.

This book impressed me in many ways, because no matter how Africa had been presented to us by different authors, this novel has peeled all the layers to show itself as raw as it gets. We could say that the story of Yusuf, the protagonist, is heartbreaking, a story that was based on pure abandonment and solitude.  Yusuf was neglected by their parents, handled to a business man to whom they had debt, without even explaining the situation. That was their payment. ‘Uncle Aziz’ was to take Yusuf to his house to make him work to repay. He was 12.

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Love in the Time of Cholera —By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

.Reading time 5 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

It is an outstanding novel. Published in 1985, it is an open window to Garcia Marquez own story. It is based on the romantic love between his parents and all the obstacles they had to overcome to end up being together, with some variations. In the novel, Florentino Ariza, the telegraphist, witnessed how his long time love, Fermina Daza, slipped through his fingers after his love letters chased her for endless months through the whole territory of Colombia. Fermina Daza was taken away by his father, on a long trip on mule, trying to extinguish that flame of love, and he succeeded. When Fermina returned to their home town she saw him and was disappointed. She punished him with an absolute indifference for more than fifty years.

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Living to Tell the Tale — By Gabriel García Márquez

.Reading time 7 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

This is the story of Gabito, as he was called by his mother and best friends in life. It is a book of a fundamental narrative, that describes the writer’s memories between 1927 and 1950. It is also a story of personal and professional success. A success that was clearly and unequivocally elusive, for many years.

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FLIGHTS by Olga Tokarczuk

.Reading time 7 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Note: This review has some spoilers…

Olga Tokarczuk does not need an introduction. Well, she is from Poland, Nobel Literature Prize 2018. That’s it. She has won several literature prices before. I understand why. She writes as if she were rolling over sentences in a beautiful song and each one of those sentences are attached to one another in perfection. But it was not this what left me with an open mouth. After several days and weeks of finishing ‘Flights’ my head is still spinning trying to guess how was she capable of put such simple stories, that could happen to anyone, in paper. Some of us have lived those stories, or at least one of the stories (exploration of the human body, migration, travel, languages, romance, life and death), but none of us would have been capable of telling them in such a sublime way.

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