I'm leaving Daniel Alarcon's list for a while, but taking just a moment to consider the books I completed -
- Nowhere Man / Aleksandar Hemon
- Flight Without End / Joseph Roth
- This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski
- Ours / Sergei Dovlatov
- The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat / Ryszard Kapuściński
In addition, last year I read some early plays and the corresponding parts of a few biographies of Vaclav Havel, a collection of writings by Karel Capek, and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. At present I am still making my slow way through Havel's Letters to Olga. Together these readings cover the period from the interwar period (and retrospectively, WWI itself), through the fall of the Soviet Union and into the post Soviet era. Geographically the authors are from Germany, Austria, the former Yugoslavia, former Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia.
I'm grateful for the chance to have some concrete glimpses of the intellectual currents, histories and attitudes of a part of the world and a period of time I have mostly known from summary and encapsulation.
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