Deeply rooted in the South African reality of the past three decades, the last year’s Booker Prize winner, The Promise by Damon Galgut, is a story about an agricultural family, the Swarts, whose destiny unfolds to the rhythm of four consecutive funerals, political changes and a constantly returning question of an unkept promise once made by seriously ill Manie to her black servant Salome. At death’s door, she wishes for the decrepit tiny cottage situated on the other side of the rural propert...
This article about the work of the 2018 Nobel laureate may baffle you. Firstly, I will not comply with the golden rule unofficially imposed on every Pole who dares to write about their national literature in a foreign language: "you will write flatteringly about it or not write about it at all". Furthermore, my text, being not very laudatory, will certainly recall the opinion of the ruling party’s supporters as unable to accept Olga Tokarczuk’s vision, as being too progressive and not suffici...
One of the most emblematic figures of the latest francophone literature, Leïla Slimani gained public recognition when she received the Goncourt Prize in 2016 for Lullaby, a story about a Parisian nanny, who, as a result of mental instability, murders her two charges. It is a flashback novel, which begins with a rather crude description of the crime scene, focusing afterwards on the circumstances prior to the infanticide. This narrative solution intensifies the suspense, as readers follow the ...
