NUMBER: 87

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Austrian; Pages: 150

Satisfaction rating: 8.5

OVERVIEW:

Miss Hester Harper, middle aged and eccentric, brings Katherine into her emotionally impoverished life. Together they sew, cook gourmet dinners for two, run the farm, make music and throw dirty dishes down the well.

One night, driving along the deserted track that leads to the farm, they run into a mysterious creature. They heave the body from the roo bar and dump it into the farm’s deep well. But the voice of the injured intruder would not be stilled and, most disturbing of all, the closer Katherine is drawn to the edge of the well, the farther away she gets from Hester.

Continue reading

NUMBER: 76

Genre: Non-fiction; Origin: Austrian; Pages: 100

Satisfaction rating: 2.5

OVERVIEW:

The letters were originally written to Franz Kappus, a 19-year-old student at the Military Academy of Vienna, of which Rilke was an alumnus. Discouraged by the prospect of military life, Kappus began to send his poetry to the 27-year-old Rilke, seeking both literary criticism and career advice. Their correspondence lasted from 1902 to 1908. In 1929, three years after Rilke’s death, Kappus assembled and published the ten letters.

Continue reading

NUMBER: 75

Genre: Fiction; Origin: France; Pages: 100

Satisfaction rating: 9.5

OVERVIEW:

Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras’s childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her older Chinese lover in the waning days of France’s colonial empire.

Continue reading

NUMBER: 71

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Germany; Pages: 100

Satisfaction rating: 8.5

OVERVIEW:

The first facts to be presented are brutal. On Wednesday, 20 February 1974, a young woman of 27 leaves her apartment in a certain city at about 6.45pm to attend a dance at a private home. Following a brief encounter with a man wanted by the police, the hitherto unremarkable Katharina Blum becomes the object of a smear campaign conducted by an unscrupulous newspaper. Labelled a whore, communist sympathizer and atheist, her life is ruined; her privacy and reputation systematically destroyed.

Continue reading

NUMBER: 67

Genre: Fiction; Origin: Japan; Pages: 100

Satisfaction rating: 8.0

OVERVIEW:

Hear the Wind Sing takes place in 1970, following the 21 year old narrator for 19 days from August 8 to 28. The story covers the craft of writing, the Japanese student movement, and, like later Murakami novels, relationships and loss. The narrator’s close friend ‘the Rat’, around whom the trilogy of the Rat evolves, is a student and bar patron who expresses a general alienation towards society. The narrator describes the fictional American writer Derek Heartfield as a primary influence, citing his pulp science fiction work, and quoting him at several points.

Continue reading