Bookseller: John Sandoe (Books) Ltd.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I love listening to The Book Show on my iPod. Romana Koval is an excellent interviewer who gives each author time to tell his/her story. But what I like most is exposure to authors who have not published in the U.S. Ironically, this is also what I like least. These books are expensive and difficult to locate.
First I discovered Andrey Kurkov, author of Death and the Penguin, which has been published in the U.S. and is available at Amazon.com.
Death and the Penguin is a gripping novel about a man named Victor and his adopted pet penguin Misha. Aspiring author Victor is hired by a post-soviet, mob-owned newspaper to write obituaries for the undead. Eventually, as each obituary nears publication, the subject of each obituary dies. Kurkov takes us on a wild chase of reality amidst absurdity. . . Or is it absurdity amidst reality?. . . Or are they one and the same? As I see it, this is the point of the novel--that with time people will embrace absurdity as normality.
I finished Death and the Penguin in record time, only to learn that Kurkov wrote a sequel, Penguin Lost, and that it is only available in the UK. I searched and searched. Eventually I found a copy through Froogle, bought it, read it, and loved it.
That's when I decided to read all Kurkov's books. I found Case of the General's Thumb without too much trouble. A Matter of Death and Life, however, proved difficult. Several U.S. booksellers carried it, but most charged upwards of $25.
Which brings us to the point of this long-winded message: my wonderful mother and sister, and John Sandoe (Books) Ltd. Immediately upon learning that my mother and sister planned to visit London, England, I scoured the internet for a bookseller within walking distance of their hotel. I found John Sandoe (Books) Ltd. http://www.johnsandoe.com/.
I was after two books: Andrey Kurkov's Novella "A Matter of Death and Life," and Samuel Shimon's "An Iraqi in Paris: An Autobiographical Novel."
Neither is published in the United States. Thanks to my mother, sister, and John Sandoe (Books) Ltd. both now happily reside on my bookshelf.
3 comments:
yea!!! I am so glad that your mother and sister love you so much. You must be the luckiest guy in the whole world. . . Did you know that the New York Times keeps obituaries on file? Seriously. You could write yours now and file it with them and they promise to publish it when you die. Creepy.
Yikes, I would never write my own obituary, if only for superstitious reasons. I guess people want to influence how they are remembered. There is another book I would like to read called "A Brief History of the Dead" that considers a similar issue -- that of death and memory. Here is a review from Amazon.com: A deadly virus has spread rapidly across Earth, effectively cutting off wildlife specialist Laura Byrd at her crippled Antarctica research station from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the planet's dead populate "the city," located on a surreal Earth-like alternate plane, but their afterlives depend on the memories of the living, such as Laura, back on home turf. Forced to cross the frozen tundra, Laura free-associates to keep herself alert; her random memories work to sustain a plethora of people in the city, including her best friend from childhood, a blind man she'd met in the street, her former journalism professor and her parents. Brockmeier (The Truth About Celia) follows all of them with sympathy, from their initial, bewildered arrival in the city to their attempts to construct new lives. He meditates throughout on memory's power and resilience, and gives vivid shape to the city, a place where a giraffe's spots might detach and hover about a street conversation among denizens. He simultaneously keeps the stakes of Laura's struggle high: as she fights for survival, her parents find a second chance for love—but only if Laura can keep them afloat.
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