Author Archives: Patrick Lennon

Japanese noir: David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

Published in 2007, David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero, the first in a trilogy of novels, opens on 15 August 1945 with the discovery of a woman’s rotting corpse by one Detective Minami, minutes before Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast of Japan’s unconditional … Continue reading →

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Three different editions of Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

These three editions of Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte are in fact three very different books. The first edition, pictured left and dating from 1986, was published by Babel. The second edition, an English translation by Mike Mitchell, was published by Dedalus … Continue reading →

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The strange case of Simenon’s “phototext”

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

I have just read, with much pleasure, Simenon, Pierre Assouline’s remarkable 1992 biography of the creator of Inspector Maigret (Paris: Gallimard, 1996; at nearly 1,000 pages, the French edition is almost twice as long as either the US or UK … Continue reading →

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Colum McCann’s feel-good fiction (and cheap use of photography)

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

I was surprised to discover a photograph reproduced in Colum McCann’s award-winning Let the Great World Spin (2009), which I recently picked up in this second-hand Random House edition dating from 2010. The novel takes places on and around 7 … Continue reading →

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Robots from the Czech Republic

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

Who knew the term ‘robot’ came from the Czech ‘robota’, meaning ‘forced labour’? Not me. I only discovered this recently when I found this second-hand copy of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which premiered 90 years ago, in … Continue reading →

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Long gone are the days “when the world spoke French”

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

New York Review Books has just published When the World Spoke French by the French scholar and member of the Académie française Marc Fumaroli. This volume is a translation by Richard Howard of the somewhat more modestly titled Quand l’Europe … Continue reading →

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Judging a book by its cover?

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

This undated though relatively recent Vintage Classics edition of Richard Wright’s remarkable autobiography Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945) features a cover photograph credited to the Corbis company of an unidentified young black boy. Given that this … Continue reading →

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Hugo Claus and the most unread novel in Flanders

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

I recently came across this hardback edition of Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium (1983) in the English translation by Arnold J. Pomerans published by Pantheon Books in 1990. I had already tried reading it a few years ago in … Continue reading →

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Good PR, bad PR

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

It’s been over a week already, but I still don’t get it. One minute it is announced that Philip Roth has won the Man Booker International Prize for 2011. The next minute we learn that one of only three judges, … Continue reading →

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Posada Art Books has closed

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Patrick Lennon

I knew it was coming, but I was sad to see that Posada, a bookshop in the centre of Brussels specializing in art books, had permanently closed its doors a few weeks ago already, on 3 May. Named after the … Continue reading →

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