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1830: France invades Algiers. 1962: Algeria gains independence. (1936: Assia Djebar is born. 1984: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade is written.)

It's hard to call this a novel. It's not. I'd call it an essay, except at 284 pages that's stretching it. Orientalism aside, the quote on the front calling it a "mosaic" isn't far off. Djebar mixes her own autobiography with historical sources from the 19th century and discussions with women who remember the struggle for independence, and what came before and after it.

1950s: a 13-year-old girl joins the fight for liberty after seeing her brother gunned down. Captured by the French, she sneers "What are you going to do, execute a girl? Throw me in jail if you want, you won't be here long enough to keep me in it." 20 years later Assia Djebar interviews her, a prematurely aging woman, taking care of her husband's children. So it goes.

The central (and somewhat belaboured) metaphor here is the veil: the one women are expected to wear past a certain age, sure, but also the other veils. The one drawn over the victims of colonialisation by letting the colonialists write history. The one drawn by language, by the palimpsest of history (Algiers has Roman ruins, Christian saints, Turkish beys...) The things that are hidden by being made conspicuous, and vice versa. The freedom offered by untouchability.

While the man still has the right to four legitimate wives, we girls, big and little, have at our command four languages to express desire before all that is left for us is sighs and moans: French for secret missives; Arabic for our stifled aspirations towards God-the-Father, the God of the religions of the Book; Lybico-Berber which takes us back to the pagan idols--mother gods--of pre-Islamic Mecca. The fourth language, for all females, young or old, cloistered or half-emancipated, remains that of the body: the body which male neighbours' and cousins' eyes require to be deaf and blind, since they cannot completely incarcerate it...

People are buried, not just in the ground (martyrs, victims, traitors, invaders) but in the language as well; some openly, with huge monuments, others quietly, so as to pretend they never existed. Or at least never needed a monument. Djebar writes of Algeria in French, the country that enslaved her people, the language that let her mother treat her father as an equal, the language that isolated her from the women of her own family.

Exposing myself by writing my autobiograpy in the language of the former enemy puts me at constant risk of burning myself up.

It's notable that even The Battle of Algiers puts men at the centre of everything. Meanwhile, European politicians want to solve a problem simply by banning a piece of cloth. And so layers keep being added, and all a writer can do is point them out.

Julia falls through one of those cracks in life; she's just arrived at a crowded seaside resort with her husband and infant son, they've been driving all day and have barely had time to unpack when she realises she forgot to pack her son's formula, jumps in the car and drives to an all-night chemist's... And then can't find her way back to the apartment they've rented, one of thousands of identical ones. Her purse with her ID and mobile phone is stolen and she's suddenly all alone in an unfamiliar town where she doesn't know anybody, has no way to contact her husband, no way to get cash, no way to find her way back to her own life. Seemingly doomed to become a homeless, crazy woman unless she can somehow figure out a way back.

Except of course, in "reality", she's been in a car wreck and is lying unconscious in a hospital bed, dreaming the whole thing.

Yeah, The Sopranos did it better, partly because we already knew the characters, whereas Sánchez sets up the plot first and lets us get to know the characters afterwards, putting her in the slightly awkward position of establishing them while she's putting them through various trauma and dream sequences. For the most part it works quite well, though, alternating between Julia's and her husband's POV and drawing connections between the two worlds that may, or may not, make perfect sense, and with a feel of creepy, July-basked dread that's always kept low enough to never turn into full-on clichéd horror.

de Vigan is a poet of powerlessness; much like Underground Time, No And Me has Parisian characters struggle with the realisation that their life isn't nearly as in their control as society tells them it is - and that it's not necessarily balanced with being able to influence the things they're not supposed to think about. "Me" is Lou, a 13-year-old schoolgirl, precocious and intelligent enough to be bumped up a few classes but still only a kid; "No" is Nolwenn, an 18-year-old homeless girl who reluctantly agrees to be Lou's school assignment, friend, and adopted sister. Is it really that easy - take in someone who's spent the entirety of their short life being screwed over, clean her up, give her a happy home (as happy as Lou's home can be) and live happily ever after? On the other hand - how much easier, or how much harder, is it to keep looking the other way and doing nothing?

We can send supersonic jets and rockets into outer space, identify a criminal from a strand of hair or a tiny particle of skin, create tomatoes that keep for three weeks in a fridge without shriveling, squeeze billions of data onto a computer chip. We can let people die in the streets.

There have been far better storytellers than Borges, but most of them are chemists at best.

Borges' Fictions is (are?) curiously fragile. Which is not to say that they're poorly written, or that they don't hold up 70 years later, but simply that for most of these stories, I find myself wondering if they are indeed stories or simply thought experiments, essays on potential stories, a literary criticism of things never written (or, taken somewhat less literally, always and constantly written). There is always narrating going on, but it's ... diaphanous is a good word. You could make an argument that Borges, had he been a different kind of writer, could have written the novels or the short stories which he here prefers to simply outline and then pick apart - or let the audience pick apart - and made a pretty good career out of that. Instead, he gives us that fantastic moment in A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain, where he tells us (fuck "show don't tell") that the greatest detective fiction can quite simply be wrong.

And yet, rereading (some of) these stories after almost 20 years I remember them, so clearly there's something more going on than just a sharp critical eye. Or if it's simply that I recognize just how much he's obviously influenced some of my best reading over the last few years, from Eco to Hoppe.

He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind.

Time, literature, narrative, language - the idea that conceptualizing them not only makes for intriguing literature, but even the so-called "real life". Borges wrote literary viruses, little stories that should be periodically re-read to recalibrate.

3/5 to one of the most important literary works of all time? Seriously?

Well, yeah. That's for my experience of it, not for the work itself. Because while there's no denying the influence of Dante both on literature, culture and faith, fact remains (at least for me) that unless you know a lot both about antique mythology, mediaeval theology and 13th century Italian politics, reading it becomes a bit of a chore at times. There are passages of absolute beauty, with ideas and arguments that still carry weight (even if I don't always agree with them - Dante's Catholic apologism, or his call for a strong moral leader, however sympathetic his reasoning). And then there are long, and rather mean-spirited, lists of people who deserve to be punished because Dante doesn't like them. And even if this edition has 100 pages of footnotes with all the details you might want to know, it still doesn't make for very contemplative reading when you have to look up the meaning of every other line, and nor does knowing the background necessarily make those passages any more relevant. On the other hand, it's also worth noting to a modern scientifically minded reader just how learnéd this representative of the supposed dark ages was, how sharp his reasoning even if he doesn't have all the facts. (Anyone claiming everyone believed the Earth was flat until Columbus should get smacked upside the head with this book, and it's heavy.)

Then again, that is one of the things I like about The Divine Comedy - that it's so very obviously human, and comes across a bit more comedic than perhaps Dante intended, without losing any of its power. Dante decries vanity, pride, excess and vengefulness, while spending 99 songs elevating his ex to sainthood, his political enemies to examples of the worst torture he could devise, and himself to prophet and heir to Virgil. (Virgil who, much like Dante, made up his own additions to older myths and then had people believe it - the line between poetic license and history was a lot thinner, or at least more obviously thin.)

I expected to be thrilled by Inferno, and I was, but I have to say Paradise gets unfairly overlooked. While a lot of it is simply Dante having Beatrice and various biblical figures explain the apparent unfairness of the world with "Because God says so, and because everyone is in their right place and shouldn't aspire to more, so there", it's also home to some real beauty as Dante tries to fuse a complete understanding of the world and its myths with sheer passion and ecstasy. A light shines through this book; I read it as human, through Dante and (the brilliant translation by) Ingvar Björkeson. I blast John Coltrane for the last few songs. From chaos, order. From order, chaos. Call that the hundredth song.

Nu är det måndag och ingenting skall tas ifrån oss som vi inte själva valt att lägga undan

Kristian Lundberg är förbannad, och det med rätta. Han ser så mycket som går fel, så mycket som går bakåt; arbetsrätten som luckras upp, segregeringen som ökar både mellan klass och etnicitet, det fysiska och ekonomiska våldet mot kvinnor och barn som tillåts fortgå och öka, avhumaniseringen av dem som har det sämst, blindheten och handlingsförlamningen hos dem som inte har det. Var är arbetarlitteraturen, var är handlingsviljan, var är planerna, var är medmänskligheten, frågar han - ironiskt nog läser jag detta ett par dagar efter att Jimmie Åkesson hävdat att SDs rasism i själva verket är just medmänsklighet, dagen efter att jag själv skrivit den här krönikan.

Den som skriver blir också den som definierar världen. Den som säger "bli ljus" är också den som tänder den första facklan.

Tyvärr, liksom alla krönikesamlingar - boken består av en salig blandning av längre essäer, korta blänkare, dikter, skisser till självbiografi, alla odaterade - blir det lite splittrat. Inte så att någon av delarna egentligen är märkbart sämre, men jag saknar något genomgående, någon konkret... handlingsplan är mycket att begära av en författare, förstås, men nu har han ju ordet här, vad skulle han vilja se i stället?

Men ändå. Starkt.

Det finns ingen som tänker att man blir människa just genom att vägra det omänskliga.

12 people are working. They're workers, so it's what they do. The bricklayer builds a wall, the seamstress runs her sewing machine, the telemarketer phones people in alphabetical order, the butcher chops up carcasses, the Romanian (that's his profession) does... everything nobody else wants to do. While they work, they ponder their work. None of them have names, they're just representatives of their professions.

It gradually becomes obvious that they're all working side by side. Literally, in a huge abandonded factory, the butcher standing next to the telemarketer, the computer programmer right beside the auto mechanic. And that they're not, technically, producing anything but their actual work; everything they make is thrown away, or undone by themselves - the bricklayer's job is to build a wall, knock it down, build the exact same wall, knock it down, over and over and over again. They work under floodlights. Behind the floodlights is an audience who occasionally cheer, jeer or applaud. They've come to watch people work. Nobody knows why. Is it a commercial for an employment agency? Is it a satirical play? Is it an unemployment benefit? Is it an installation? Why do they work exactly 8 hours every day? Why are they expected to work at all? Is the security guard who keeps the audience in check part of the ... whatever it is, or is he just doing his job? What about the hooker waiting outside every evening?

Spain currently has a 25.1% unemployment rate. La mano invisible is the novel Karl Marx and Frederick Taylor might have written together if they'd woken up in the early 21st century and spent 6 months getting drunk together and watching reality shows. At times, the obvious theorizing underlying it gets in the way; but it works thanks to the constant questioning, trying to get at this peculiar idea of what work is and why we kill ourselves with it, while the postmodern audience tries to think we can sit on the bleechers and just watch (as if that wasn't a job we're expected to do). Rosa doesn't need names or ages for his characters to bring them to life, let their various experiences and professions draw parallels and clashes, without ever getting to any sort of easy conclusion (though the ending is very satisfying). It's not a perfect novel, but it's one of the most intriguing ones I've read in a long time.

The blurb on the back promises a multilayered novel with "sheer, poetic, minimalistic language"... Can't say I saw any of that. There are some really interesting themes that occasionally pop up in this novel, set in the first few decades of the 20th century in what is now Tanzania, a country that's always been a hub of trade and ideas from all over the Indian Ocean; but for the most part it's mired in an aimless, pedestrian story where most of what we know about the supposed protagonist is what others say about him, with endless descriptions of details that rarely seem to matter to the story. Disappointment.

99% of all books written about Africa by non-Africans are about non-Africans. Africa becomes a metaphor for their own problems, a canvas on which they paint their own landscape. (And of course, the same largely applies to non-African readers such as myself.) The difference with Oreille Rouge (Red Ear) is that it's very, very aware of it, and delights in poking fun at it.

A writer (possibly named Eric) gets a chance to stay in Mali for a few months to work on a book. Immediately, he's completely overcome by all the images the simple word "Africa" (never "Mali", he has no idea what Mali is) conjures up; the savage, pure, uncorrupted, oppressed, dark, light, ancient, brand-new land of hippos and elephants and noisy crickets where he, as a white man, will submerge himself and show the hipocrisy of white men who think they have the right to that story. Of course, Mali turns out to be a foreign country, no more, no less. But Eric doesn't notice, he's too busy wrestling with the images of Africa he insists on inventing and trapping in his carefully selected and deliberately water-logged little moleskin notebook.

And so, the Africa that can be perceived with one's senses escapes him. He begins to expound. Let us listen to him for a minute. The cars down there were driven in France twenty, thirty years ago. The libraries get the books we would have destroyed ottherwise, old, cheesy, nonsensical entertaining novels. The hospitals get to inherit our expired drugs, their TVs show our worst shows. In this way the rich countries think they support Africa: by pouring their garbage on it.

He's not wrong.

Oreille rouge is a very funny book, saying virtually nothing about Africa and a lot more about westerners' view of it. (Even the local boy who's promised to show Eric a hippo knows everything about hippos from an encyclopaedia.) In the end, I'm not entirely sure that that works for the whole book; after a while, you get pretty annoyed at writer-Eric's puppetry of character-Eric. But still, it's an intriguing book that asks its questions simply with an innocent grin.

Spoiler alert: "Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived."

We know everyone dies. We know, in quite a few cases, how they die. We may even know why. The question that remains is to what end, at which cost, and in whose interest. What it says about the society built on their judgments.

Bring Up The Bodies continues the story from where Wolf Hall left off, and that's both its strength and its weakness; Mantel continues to write in the same gorgeous, palimpsestish way where everything echoes in all directions at once, where a 16th century soap opera becomes an autopsy of the entire modern-age society to which we still cling, like fleas on a dead (or at least very old) dog. Of course, by this point, the story has become what it is: One long tale of how Anne Boleyn (spoiler!) came to be executed. Of how power justifies its own actions, of the hypocrisy of a king who publicly woos a concubine can charge his queen with treason for alleged infidelity, of the different paths open to you based on class or gender or cleverness, of the fundamental differences between a country where kings fight on the battlefield at the least provocation under protection of the Holy Virgin and a country where the king sits on a throne, managing an economy, making informed decisions...

...Basically, all the stuff that made Wolf Hall a stunning novel is here too to great effect, but apart from continuing the inevitable plot, Bring Up The Bodies doesn't add a whole lot more. Thomas Cromwell is where he is, still years away from his end, as powerful as he'll get, and the story lacks some of the dynamics that his rise from a nobody that Wolf Hall could draw on.