Bookeria

#Project195 - ARGENTINA

Bookeria — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:54:36 GMT

A Bookshop in Valencia

During a week-long trip to Valencia, I bought several books from one of the city’s chain bookstores.

Those purchases are always a highlight for me. Not only can I discover local bestsellers completely unknown outside Spain, but I can also browse Spanish-language books from across Latin America without having to spend hours searching through online bookstores.

On this trip, I picked up a short book by Julio Cortázar: Historias de cronopios y de famas, originally published in 1962.

At first glance, it seemed like a perfect fit for Project195. A completely new reading experience from one of Argentina’s most celebrated writers and intellectuals.

The Life of Julio Cortázar

Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium in 1914 to Argentine diplomats. Because he entered the world almost at the epicenter of the First World War—less than a month after it began—his family fled the German occupation, first to Switzerland and later back to Argentina after the war.

Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, photographed at the UNESCO gardens in Paris.

Sara Facio - Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, by Alicia D’Amico, Sara Facio & Julio Cortázar - Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires (1968)

Abandoned by his father at the age of six, Cortázar grew up with his mother near Buenos Aires. He became a teacher and studied philosophy, although he never completed his degree. His professional life revolved around translating from French and teaching French literature.

Under Juan Perón’s government, his work became politically unwelcome, prompting him to emigrate to France in 1951. There, he wrote his most famous books and established the literary reputation that would eventually make him one of the central figures of twentieth-century Latin American literature.

Although he occasionally returned to Argentina, he remained closely connected to France for the rest of his life and was buried in Paris after his death in 1984.

For Project195, I could hardly have chosen a more interesting literary figure.

I may, however, have chosen the wrong book.

Or perhaps surrealism simply isn’t a genre I will ever truly love.

Avoiding the Obvious Choice

Cortázar is best known for Hopscotch (Rayuela), one of the most influential and experimental novels of the twentieth century.

I wanted to avoid the obvious choice, however, and instead reached for the much shorter Historias de cronopios y de famas.

The book is a collection of extremely short, often poetic pieces in which Cortázar dismantles everyday reality and rebuilds it through absurd and surreal perspectives.

Four Different Ways of Looking at Reality

The book consists of four distinct sections.

1. Manual de Instrucciones

The first section, Manual de Instrucciones (”Instruction Manual”), focuses on ordinary activities most of us consider too obvious to think about.

Climbing stairs, for example.

Cortázar describes such actions with elegance, mystery, irony, and humor. By elevating mundane routines to the level of literary subjects, he challenges readers to reconsider how they perceive reality itself.

2. Ocupaciones raras

The second section contains slightly more narrative stories centered around trivial events that become absurdly important.

One memorable example involves an elaborate attempt to identify the owner of a single strand of hair washed down a bathroom sink.

3. Material plástico

The third section broadens its scope and explores larger ideas through surreal premises.

In one piece, so many books are produced that entire oceans become clogged with them, preventing ships from moving across the water.

4. Historias de cronopios y de famas

The final and most famous section introduces three fictional categories of beings: Cronopios, Famas, and Esperanzas.

These function as allegories for different personality types.

The Cronopios are artistic, idealistic, and unconventional dreamers.

The Famas represent the respectable, organized, self-important bourgeoisie.

The Esperanzas occupy the passive middle ground between the two—comfortable, indifferent, and resistant to change.

A Gateway into Literary Experimentation

Together, these four sections provide an excellent introduction to Cortázar’s experimental literary style.

The book is less concerned with plot than with perspective. Its purpose is not to tell stories in the conventional sense but to force readers to see familiar things in unfamiliar ways.

That approach made Cortázar one of the leading figures of the Latin American Boom.

Cortázar and the Latin American Boom

During the 1960s and 1970s, a generation of writers including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes transformed world literature.

They broke with literary traditions, experimented with narrative forms, and brought Latin American fiction to audiences far beyond their home countries.

Cortázar occupied a particularly distinctive position within this movement because of his fascination with surrealism, absurdity, and playful experimentation.

Why the Book Didn’t Fully Work for Me

And that is probably where my personal difficulty begins.

I can appreciate Cortázar’s humor, irony, originality, and imaginative approach to reality. I understand why his work is admired and why so many writers consider him a master.

What I struggle with is emotional immersion.

I never lose myself in these stories.

I never fall completely under their spell.

At least for now, I find Cortázar more interesting than moving—more intellectually stimulating than emotionally compelling.

That may change in the future.

For the moment, however, I see Historias de cronopios y de famas primarily as a fascinating literary curiosity and an enjoyable break from the kinds of novels I usually read.

I remain a great admirer of the Latin American Boom.

I just don’t think Cortázar will become my favorite representative of it.

My rating - 4/10

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#Project195 - BULGARIA

Bookeria — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:34:59 GMT

The Self-Help Trend I Didn’t Trust

For many years, I toyed with the idea of keeping a diary.

I enjoy writing. Some people even claim I’m fairly good at it. Yet I never really had many opportunities to write. There were school essays, two master’s theses, a handful of insignificant articles, and a few short stories that never left the drawer.

The idea of a diary fascinated me all the more because of that.

At the same time, journaling had become one of those self-improvement trends endlessly promoted by internet gurus and amateur life coaches, often placed on the same shelf as ice baths, morning affirmations in front of the mirror, or weekly fasting rituals.

Every time I encountered another Instagram reel or celebrity testimonial praising the almost magical powers of journaling, my enthusiasm faded. I knew how easily I had fallen for similar promises in the past. I had tested productivity hacks, experimented with fashionable routines, and even had a brief affair with self-help literature—a relationship that fortunately ended rather quickly.

I worried that a daily writing ritual would disappoint me, and that writing itself would lose the significance I had always attached to it.

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A Diary Without a Single Missing Day

Yet on January 1st, 2024, I wrote the first page.

Since then—and as I write this in early June 2026—I have not missed a single day.

Most mornings, shortly after waking up, I sit down with a notebook and write for a few minutes. Sometimes it is only a single sentence:

“So much work today that I don’t have time to write—running off to work!”

On other days, I record what happened the day before. What I accomplished, what troubled me, where I succeeded, where I failed. I write about small victories and larger disappointments. I write about memories and fleeting thoughts—the ones that visit all of us briefly before disappearing forever.

The diary allows me not to lose them.

It gives me a chance to sit with them for a moment, observe them, think them through.

Over time, I began recording not only plans and ideas for the coming days and weeks, but also my emotions. How I felt about myself, about other people, about events unfolding around me, and perhaps most importantly, about the thoughts themselves.

I described the day my grandfather died.

I documented, step by step, my plan to propose to my partner. Eventually I was able to write—with enormous relief and joy—that she had said yes, and how that moment made me feel.

The diary became part of my life.

I cannot clearly prove that it has improved my life or made me better at navigating everyday challenges. Yet I can no longer imagine abandoning the practice.

A Recommendation That Carried Real Weight

That is one reason why Georgi Gospodinov’s The Gardener and Death gave me such profound pleasure.

The book was recommended to me by my fiancée’s aunt.

She is a woman in her fifties who has lived for more than two decades in the same building as my future wife’s parents. Life dealt her two devastating tragedies. Around nine years ago, her husband died unexpectedly, leaving her alone with their two grown sons. A few years later, her older son died suddenly as well. The younger son moved to the opposite end of the country years ago and visits only occasionally.

She remains surrounded by family, yet lives alone.

A widow. A mother who lost a child.

We often talk about books. One day she recommended Gospodinov’s novel and told me that no other book had helped her confront grief and loss so directly.

At the time, my Project195 was gathering momentum, and I knew immediately that The Gardener and Death would represent Bulgaria.

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Georgi Gospodinov and Bulgaria’s Literary Voice

Georgi Gospodinov, born in 1968, is probably the most widely translated contemporary Bulgarian author. He has received numerous literary awards and won the prestigious International Booker Prize for his novel Time Shelter in 2023.

The Gardener and Death is an extraordinarily intimate work.

Written as a sequence of fragmented yet interconnected reflections, observations, and memories, it focuses on the gradual dying of the author’s father. The book resembles a diary kept by a son who becomes the closest witness to his parent’s final months.

Delaying the Inevitable

As critic Amber Ruth Paulen observes, the diary form allows Gospodinov to keep his father alive through memory. By constantly returning to childhood scenes and earlier years—times when his father was still healthy and strong—the author preserves him on the page.

The actual moment of death is postponed for as long as possible.

The diary itself becomes a form of resistance. Each entry delays the inevitable confrontation. Each memory pushes the final ending slightly further away.

What the Book Revealed to Me

Reading The Gardener and Death reinforced something I had already been doing.

Not because I would dare compare my modest notebooks to Gospodinov’s work.

Rather, the novel reminded me of the extraordinary power contained within the act of keeping a diary.

Time moves relentlessly forward.

Whether we like it or not, we change with it. Our grandparents change. Our parents change. Our partners and children change. We will never again be exactly who we are today.

Yet through journals, memories, and written words, we preserve fragments of time.

We stretch moments beyond their natural limits.

We grant them a longer life.

And sometimes, when we return to those pages years later, we discover that the diary contains far more than we remembered putting into it.

My rating - 8.5

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#Project195 - BELARUS

Bookeria — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 20:34:07 GMT

One Sunday afternoon in Kraków, I went for a short walk around the Main Market Square.

Hundreds of excited tourists surrounded me. Plastic advertising boards littered the sidewalks, inviting every passerby to stop for a traditional Polish lunch. Church bells echoed across the city center.

As I was about to head home, I noticed something I had somehow missed despite walking that street hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times before.

Hidden in the courtyard of one of the old townhouses was a tiny second-hand bookstore.

A modest glass display case was attached to the building’s façade. Inside sat several dusty academic volumes, most of them roughly a century old, alongside a small sign directing visitors deeper into the passageway.

I gave in to temptation and stepped inside.

The unmistakable smell of old paper, dust, and hardcovers handled by generations of readers immediately filled the air.

A Perfect Discovery

I rarely buy books from second-hand bookstores.

I am a perfectionist. I like clean pages, simple covers, and well-preserved copies.

Yet on one shelf I found a neatly stacked collection of small books wrapped in black dust jackets. Most were in remarkably good condition. Each belonged to a series published by the Polish State Publishing Institute in the early 1990s called World Prose.

Could there have been a better hunting ground for Project195?

Perhaps Amazon.

But here I could actually hold each book in my hands, study its cover, leaf through its pages, and decide whether it deserved a place in the project.

One of them was perfect.

It was The Sign of Misfortune by Vasil Bykaŭ.

A Writer Who Knew War Firsthand

I do not know whether one must be a soldier to write convincingly about war.

Vasil Bykaŭ was one, and he wrote about war better than almost anyone.

Born in a small village in what is now Belarus in 1924, Bykaŭ remains one of the most celebrated Belarusian writers, notable not only for writing in Russian but also in Belarusian.

Until his death in 2003, he worked as a writer, translator, intellectual, and, for a time, a political figure.

Most importantly, however, he was also a veteran.

At just seventeen years old, he joined the Red Army after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Belarus was then part of the Soviet state, and the experiences he gained during the war would shape the rest of his literary career.

Most of his work focused on the German-Soviet conflict during the Second World War—the conflict known in the former Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War.

Unlike many war writers who approached conflict through absurdism, satire, or existential reflection—authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bykaŭ relied on uncompromising realism.

The Invisible People of History

In the novel I discovered in that Kraków bookstore, Bykaŭ avoids heroism, grand speeches, and larger-than-life characters.

His protagonists are not merely ordinary people.

They are people almost invisible to history itself.

While many war novels focus on decisive battles or political leaders shaping the course of nations, The Sign of Misfortune centers on an elderly farming couple living in a crumbling cottage at the edge of nowhere.

Unfortunately for them, Bykaŭ’s edge of nowhere happens to lie directly on the path of German troops moving eastward toward the front.

So Why Call It Horror?

A horror novel is supposed to disturb, terrify, and frighten its reader.

Today, the genre is associated with classics such as Frankenstein and Dracula, or with modern bestsellers by Stephen King and Thomas Harris.

What does any of that have to do with a Belarusian novel about peasant life during the Second World War?

The answer is simple.

I cannot remember the last time a book frightened me this much.

I was not afraid of monsters under the bed.

I was not afraid of supernatural creatures or serial killers.

I was afraid of violence.

I was afraid of humiliation.

I was afraid of death.

Most of all, I was afraid for the people in this book.

As H. P. Lovecraft once wrote:

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

The unknown is precisely what makes Bykaŭ’s fiction so terrifying.

Will a German soldier harm us?

Will a distant relative betray us?

Will the occupiers discover the last food we have hidden away for emergencies?

Will a passing soldier’s momentary whim end with the death of the animal we love?

Will we survive until tomorrow?

These are the questions we ask on behalf of the novel’s characters, sparing them the need to voice their fears aloud.

On the surface, The Sign of Misfortune is a simple story about a forgotten Belarusian village where life follows the rhythms of nature.

But at a certain point it transforms into one of the most frightening books I have ever read.

It becomes horror.

Read Vasil Bykaŭ if you want to learn not only what happened in Belarus during the Second World War, but also what it felt like to live there at that moment in history.

My rating - 9/10

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* Translated from Polish using AI.

#Project195 - URUGUAY

Bookeria — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:06:45 GMT

Whenever I finish a book from a particular country, I try to take away something more than just the story itself.

After reading a novel from Malta, I found myself researching local corruption. Following a Somali novel, I spent time learning about the country’s tradition of sung poetry and its history. After finishing Crime and Punishment from Russia, I ended up analyzing global lists of the greatest novels ever written.

I believe that a book—whether it is history, fiction, poetry, or reportage—can be a window not only into a country’s culture but also into entirely new fields of knowledge.

Perhaps I made a mistake when choosing my book from Uruguay.

Eduardo Galeano in 2012

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to read something by Eduardo Galeano. Yet I ended up selecting what was probably his least obvious choice: El Libro de los Abrazos (The Book of Embraces).

Eduardo Galeano and the Memory of a Continent

Eduardo Galeano was born in Uruguay in 1940 and died just over a decade ago, in 2015.

He was one of the country’s most respected journalists, writers, and public intellectuals, associated with the political left.

Although he came from one of Uruguay’s more prominent families, opposition to authoritarianism was never foreign to him. Following the military coup of 1973, Galeano was briefly imprisoned and later forced into exile in Argentina.

Over the course of his literary career, he produced several remarkable works, including Open Veins of Latin America—one of the books Isabel Allende reportedly took with her while fleeing Chile after Pinochet seized power—and the trilogy Memory of Fire.

His books combine sweeping historical analysis of Latin America, from European colonization and slavery to wars of independence and modern dictatorships.

In short, there is no shortage of excellent places to start.

Yet while browsing a bookstore in Valencia during a trip to Spain, I stumbled across El Libro de los Abrazos and, on impulse, decided that this would be my Uruguayan book.

Why I Thought I Had Chosen the Wrong Book

Unlike Galeano’s celebrated historical works and political reportage, The Book of Embraces is deeply personal.

It is a collection of brief literary fragments: aphorisms, miniatures, private reflections, humorous observations, and poetic snapshots.

Together they form a collage of memory—a mosaic of Latin American history, culture, and, above all, everyday life.

Through these fragments, Galeano attempts to preserve his own memories while transforming them into the collective memory of an entire continent.

The result is a patchwork of stories about violence and exploitation, absurd anecdotes exposing the follies of power, and ironic reflections on both grand historical events and tiny moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

The Walls Speak

Among all these fragments, the passages that stayed with me most were those Galeano collected under the title Dicen las paredes—The Walls Speak.

These were not his own words. They were graffiti.

Anonymous messages he encountered during his travels and decided to preserve.

Urban poetry is often ephemeral. Paint fades. Walls are demolished. Entire neighborhoods disappear. Even though Galeano did not write these messages himself, he became their chronicler.

Few writers, I suspect, would have been able to recognize in these small, often barely visible scribbles the voice of society itself.

That attentiveness reveals just how extraordinary an observer Galeano was. He noticed details that tell us more about Latin America than many multi-volume novels ever could.

Each graffiti fragment is accompanied by only the briefest context: where it appeared and when.

Nothing more is needed.

The Wisdom of the Streets

At the entrance to the National University in Bogotá:

“God lives.”

Written below, in a different hand:

“By a miracle.”

Elsewhere in Bogotá:

“Workers of the world, unite.”

Added underneath:

“(Last warning).”

In Caracas, during an economic crisis, at the entrance to one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods:

“Welcome, middle class!”

In the Uruguayan town of Melo:

“Help the police—torture yourself!”

At the Faculty of Economics in Montevideo:

“Drugs cause amnesia and other things I can’t remember.”

In Santiago de Chile, along the banks of the Mapocho River:

“Blessed are the drunkards, for they see God twice.”

In the Flores district of Buenos Aires:

“A girl without breasts is less of a girl than she is a buddy.”

Pick up The Book of Embraces if you are looking for Latin American humor, satire, irony, and a unique literary attempt to preserve the memory of a continent.

My rating - 7/10

#Project195 - RUSSIA

Bookeria — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:04:56 GMT

I started wondering about this question after reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Although it was not my first Russian novel, this timeless classic had been waiting patiently on my shelf for its turn. As a Pole, I will always - perhaps especially now - have mixed feelings about Russian cultural achievements. In my opinion, and certainly not only mine, they too often function as a propagandistic counterweight to centuries of Russian crimes.

The logic usually goes something like this: if Russia gave the world Dostoevsky, then surely Russians cannot be that bad.

Well, they were. And, as recent events demonstrate, they still are.

The monumental works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, or Gogol should not obscure that reality.

That said, this is not what I wanted to write about today.

As I mentioned, it was finally time for Russia in Project195, so I decided to pick up what is arguably the most famous Russian novel ever written - a book I must admit I conveniently skipped when it was assigned reading in high school.

Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment in 1866, and with it he transformed world literature for generations to come. So much has already been said and written about the novel that I have no desire to bore subscribers with yet another review that adds little to the conversation.

Portrait by Wasilij Pierow, 1872

Instead, I found myself returning to a different question.

Where Does Dostoevsky Rank?

Curious about the place of Russian literature within the global literary canon, I turned to various rankings of the greatest novels ever written. I wanted to see where Dostoevsky appeared on lists compiled by publications and communities such as Time, BBC, Le Monde, and Goodreads.

To my surprise, I discovered not only that he was absent from many of these lists, but also that books from outside the Anglosphere were largely absent as well.

World literature, at least as reflected by these rankings, seems to orbit around England, Ireland, and the United States, occasionally passing through France, Germany, or Spain before returning to its familiar center of gravity.

The Missing 180 Countries

I called my project Project195 for an obvious reason.

The United Nations currently recognizes 195 countries. One could reasonably argue that the number should be even higher if places such as Palestine, Kurdistan, or Catalonia were included. Whether we call it Project195 or Project195+3, however, the point remains the same:

When it comes to lists of the greatest novels ever written, at least 180 countries are effectively invisible.

As the Polish science-fiction writer Jacek Dukaj once remarked in an interview:

“Lists of the best books tell us more about the people who make them than about the books themselves.”

And that raises an interesting question.

What exactly do the world’s most influential literary rankings tell us?

The Guardian’s List

Perhaps the most widely discussed list in recent years was compiled by The Guardian.

As its creators explained:

“Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial – all lists are.”

I have no objection to the language criterion itself. It would be unreasonable to expect British journalists to read Swahili or Pashto.

Yet Project195 demonstrates that it is entirely possible to read a book from every country in the world in English translation.

On The Guardian’s list, Crime and Punishment occupies the 69th position. First place went to Middlemarch by George Eliot.

When I counted the entries, I found only 27 novels that were originally published in a language other than English.

But even that number is misleading.

If we remove Russian, French, German, Italian, and Spanish novels - and we should, if we genuinely want to understand how much of the list comes from outside the traditional centers of literary prestige - we are left with only a handful of books.

I counted six.

I may have missed one or two, but the conclusion remains the same.

Beyond the Old World

The situation looks remarkably similar on The Greatest Books, a website devoted almost entirely to rankings and literary lists.

Gabriel García Márquez ranks highly, as expected. But the next major novel from outside the countries I excluded above is The Unbearable Lightness of Being by the Czech writer Milan Kundera.

It appears at number 101.

The picture becomes even more interesting when we look at the list compiled by the French newspaper Le Monde.

In many ways, it perfectly illustrates Dukaj’s observation. Seven of the top ten books are French novels.

Touché.

To be fair, the French list also includes works from the Netherlands, Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Albania. Yet the overwhelming majority of titles remain firmly rooted in Europe.

One thing is immediately obvious: the French do not seem to hold American literature in particularly high regard.

What is almost entirely absent, however, is literature from Asia, Africa, and South America - with a few notable exceptions such as Márquez and Borges.

Our Shared Blind Spot

Does this surprise me?

After thinking about it for a while, not nearly as much as it did at first.

World literature still revolves around a European-American axis. Every now and then, a writer from elsewhere is rewarded with a Nobel Prize or granted broader international recognition, but these remain exceptions rather than the rule.

Yet this is not only the fault of publishers, critics, or journalists. It is ours as well. We should read more novels from around the world.

We would be richer for it.

And I hope that both this project and this essay might persuade a few more people to do exactly that.

My rating - 8/10

#Project195 - MALAYSIA

Bookeria — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:39:04 GMT

When reading one book from every country in the world, I sometimes struggle to choose the right one. The reasons vary. Sometimes the list of books from a given country is simply too long to make a decision. At other times, I am in the mood for something lighter, even though I know I should probably reach for a national epic. And sometimes I face dilemmas that I could even describe as moral.

That was exactly the kind of problem I encountered with Malaysia.

At first glance, the choice seemed obvious. Every search engine and online forum appeared to be shouting the same recommendation at me: The House of Doors.

This is, of course, the celebrated 2023 novel by Tan Twan Eng. Born in Penang, one of the states in northwestern Malaysia, Eng first gained international recognition with his 2012 novel The Garden of Evening Mists, which won numerous awards and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The House of Doors was also longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and appeared on many lists of the best books of the year.

So why my hesitation?

In Project195, my primary goal is to showcase a part of the national history, culture, and literature that a given book represents. The House of Doors tells a beautiful story, but it is ultimately a story of Malaysia during the colonial period, when the country was governed by the British.

In the end, I decided that colonialism is an inseparable part of Malaysian history. For centuries, the Malay Peninsula has been a meeting place of many cultures—including European ones. And although I do not yet have enough points of comparison, it seems that I could hardly have chosen a better book.

Colonial Malaysia Through Fiction

In many ways, The House of Doors is a literary novel set against the historical backdrop of early twentieth-century colonial Malaysia.

The 1920s were a period when Penang, as part of the Straits Settlements, belonged to the British Crown. The history of this part of Asia would require several textbooks to explain properly, so I will spare you the lengthy overview. For a taste of the period, you may want to explore the history of British rule on the peninsula.

The story begins with a visit by the British writer, former spy, and closeted homosexual Somerset Maugham - who was very much a real person - to the fictional British couple at the center of the novel: Lesley, the protagonist, and her husband Robert Hamlyn.

Somerset Mougham by Carl Van Vechten (1934)

Their relationship opens the door to a series of hidden stories involving other figures living in Penang during that era. Among them is Sun Yat-sen, the first provisional president of the Republic of China, who at the time was building a revolutionary movement in Malaysia aimed at overthrowing the Chinese Empire. Another is Ethel Proudlock.

It was her story that struck me as the most extraordinary part of the novel.

Why?

The Real Ethel Proudlock

Ethel Proudlock was also a real person, whose life Eng reimagines in fictionalized form.

If you had picked up virtually any British newspaper in 1911, you would probably have found it impossible to avoid her story.

That year, Ethel shot and killed William Crozier Steward, an engineer employed by a local Singaporean company. At the time, she was married to William Proudlock, the headmaster of one of the most prestigious boys’ schools on the peninsula.

She belonged to local high society. While not a member of the wealthiest or most famous colonial families, her social standing was undeniably significant.

The killing of Steward became one of the most shocking and widely discussed criminal cases of the era.

There were several reasons for that.

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A Suspicious Visit

First, the murder took place while Ethel was alone at home.

In court, she claimed that although she knew Steward, she had not expected his visit. Once she had allowed him inside, he allegedly attacked her and attempted to rape her. According to her testimony, she fired her revolver in self-defense.

Yet the very fact that Steward had visited her in the absence of her husband was considered highly suspicious. Rumors of an affair quickly spread.

Contradictions in Her Story

Second, the defendant’s version of events contained numerous inconsistencies.

The first two shots were fired on the veranda of the house. However, Proudlock then followed the wounded Steward into the garden, where she emptied the remainder of her revolver into his body, striking him several times in the back and head.

During the trial, it emerged that Ethel had purchased the revolver only days earlier and had practiced shooting with it on several occasions.

To many observers, the coincidence seemed deeply incriminating.

A Battle Over Her State of Mind

Third, both the defense and the prosecution focused heavily on Proudlock’s psychological condition.

The defense argued that she had been in shock, could not remember parts of the incident, and sought to portray her as a helpless, fragile woman overwhelmed by circumstances.

The prosecution, meanwhile, repeatedly introduced evidence suggesting remarkable composure during the killing. As mentioned earlier, prosecutors even implied that the murder may have been carefully planned in advance.

A Threat to the Colonial Order

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was Proudlock’s social status.

For decades, the colonial system had been built upon the idea that Britons were people of superior moral standards—individuals who governed and protected colonial societies from populations supposedly prone to emotion and incapable of controlling their temperaments.

Ethel belonged to the colonial elite. She was a woman. And she had shot another white member of her own social circle.

When these four factors are combined and then paired with the verdict - a death sentence handed down by a colonial court - the result becomes an explosive mixture of scandal, politics, and social upheaval.

Why the Case Matters

You can discover how Ethel Proudlock’s story ultimately ended through Wikipedia, numerous historical articles, or by reading Eng’s novel itself.

The author took this remarkable case and wove it into his narrative as one of several fascinating storylines, creating a vivid portrait of Malaysia during the colonial era.

And although Ethel’s story is not the book’s central plotline, it remains one of its many strengths.

There are many more.

My Rating - 8/10

#Project195 - ALGERIA

Bookeria — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:25:32 GMT

Project195 is 195 books from 195 countries. Through it, we get not only nearly two hundred unique literary perspectives, but just as many extraordinary stories, including those that go beyond the books themselves.

Kamel Daoud was born in 1970 in Algeria, in the city of Mostaganem. He was the eldest of six siblings. His biography is unusual, marked by a transformation from an Islamist in his youth to a writer rejected by parts of Algerian society for his criticism of Islam.

Until the age of eighteen, through the late 1980s, Daoud identified as an Islamist. He studied French literature in Oran, became a journalist, and worked for the French-language newspaper Quotidien d’Oran. During the civil war of the 1990s, he reported on massacres carried out by Islamist radicals.

In 2014, he published his first novel, The Meursault Investigation, which retells The Stranger from the perspective of one of its Arab characters. The book brought him international recognition and established his place on the literary map of the Arab world.

A voice against the current

Since breaking with Islamist sympathies in his youth, Daoud has been a vocal advocate of atheism and secularism in Algeria. This has earned him many enemies, particularly in public life.

He openly criticized Algerian political and religious elites, including President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in various publications. He did not align himself with any political party, but he became a regular commentator in French media, where he strongly criticized the Algerian regime.

In one of his statements, he said:

“If we do not decide in the so-called Arab world the question of God, we will not rehabilitate man, we will not move forward. The religious question becomes vital in the Arab world. We must confront it if we want to move forward.”

Muslim circles labeled him a traitor to the faith. He received numerous death threats, and after one of his television appearances, a well-known Salafi imam issued a fatwa against him.

The novel: Houris

In 2024, Daoud received the Prix Goncourt for the second time for a French-language novel. That novel is Houris, the book I chose to read.

Houris is set in contemporary Algeria, still living in the shadow of the “black decade” of the 1990s, the period of civil war between the state and Islamist insurgents.

The narrator and central character is a young woman who, as a child, survived a massacre in her village and an attempted throat-slitting. As an adult, she lives with both a visible scar and a deep psychological trauma that prevents her from moving on. At the same time, she is facing a decision about abortion.

What Daoud gives us is an intense portrait of both personal and collective trauma, expressed through a monologue addressed to an unborn child. Aube, the protagonist, asks whether it is worth bringing a child into a world marked by violence, crime, and silence.

Questions without answers

Can the past be accounted for?

Is it possible for an entire society to confront its crimes, even if individuals try?

Will the human body, its scars and injuries, remain the only evidence of violence erased from public memory?

Can new life be justified if past crimes remain unresolved?

Does reconciliation have moral priority over remembrance?

These are the questions Daoud poses through his protagonist. He does so in a deeply intimate yet emotionally intense way. At times, his language becomes poetic, filled with anger and irony, capturing the texture of violence itself.

A banned book

The novel sparked significant debate in Algeria and was ultimately banned.

The controversy surrounding the civil war and the violence that was later pushed out of public discourse means that today the book is discussed more openly outside Algeria than within it.

But there is another controversy.

The accusation

Daoud, who also holds French citizenship and currently lives in France, has been accused of using the personal story of one of his wife’s patients. His wife is a psychiatrist.

Saâda Arbane claims that the writer and his wife unlawfully used her life story and trauma. Like the protagonist of Houris, she survived a massacre during the civil war and carries a similar scar on her neck.

She appeared on Algerian television and stated that she survived an attempted throat-slitting as a child and now communicates through a speaking tube. She claims to have attended therapy sessions with Daoud’s wife since 2015 and points to additional similarities, including personal details such as her tattoos, profession, relationship with her mother, and her consideration of abortion.

Arbane maintains that she explicitly refused permission for her story to be used.

In an interview, she said:

“It’s my life. It’s my past. He had no right to expose it like that.”

Daoud’s lawyers argue that the claims are fabricated and part of a broader campaign by the Algerian regime to discredit the writer:

“The motives behind these Algerian warrants can only be political and part of a series of procedures aimed at silencing a writer whose latest novel evokes the massacres of the black decade in Algeria.”

What remains uncertain

At this point, the truth about the inspiration behind Houris remains unclear.

But regardless of that, the novel is worth reading, if only to see Algeria from a completely different perspective.

My rating - 7 / 10

#Project195 - OMAN

Bookeria — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:03:29 GMT

Sometimes, in Project195, I come across books that do more than offer intellectual pleasure or a new perspective on a country. They reveal problems I had never even been aware of.

This was one of those cases.

A novel about change

For Oman, I chose Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, first published in Arabic in 2010, and later in English in 2018. A year later, it became the first Arabic novel to win the International Booker Prize.

Alharthi, born in 1978, grew up in Oman and later in the United Kingdom, where she earned a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Today, she is a professor in Muscat. She has written four novels, three of which have been translated into English, but it is Celestial Bodies that brought her international recognition.

A story without a plot

At first glance, Celestial Bodies does not seem like a plot-driven novel.

It is a multi-voiced narrative centered around three sisters from the village of al-Awafi, but it quickly expands to include husbands, relatives, and entire networks of relationships. The story moves non-linearly, shifting constantly between past and present.

Each character exists within their own orbit, occasionally intersecting with others, like the celestial bodies of the title.

If there is a protagonist here, it is not a person.

It is Oman itself.

A country in transition

Through fragmented perspectives, Alharthi shows a society in transformation.

From a world of tradition, patriarchy, arranged marriages, and rigid hierarchy, to one shaped by education, mobility, and modernization.

This transformation is not presented through historical summaries, but through conversations, family dynamics, marriages, and everyday life.

Oman is not an exotic destination here. It is a real place, full of tensions: social, gendered, historical. Modernity does not erase the past. It coexists with it.

And often, it struggles against it.

The legacy of slavery

One of the central themes of the novel is the legacy of slavery.

Slavery in Oman was officially abolished only in 1970.

That is not a distant historical fact. It is recent. Just over half a century ago.

At a time when humans had already landed on the Moon, when the Vietnam War was ongoing, and when cultural revolutions were reshaping the West, slavery still existed in Oman.

Alharthi explores this legacy through relationships between former slaves and their former masters, as well as through the experiences of the first generation born into freedom.

These relationships are complex. Not easily categorized. Not reducible to simple narratives.

A long and difficult history

Oman’s connection to slavery stretches back centuries.

Due to its geographic position, it became one of the centers of the Arab slave trade across the Indian Ocean. Enslaved people, often brought from Africa, were used in agriculture, domestic work, and craftsmanship.

Some argue that slavery in the Arab world differed from the Atlantic system, with more frequent integration and emancipation.

But this does not change the fundamental reality of coercion and exploitation.

During periods of Portuguese, Persian, and Ottoman influence, and later under British pressure, attempts were made to limit the slave trade. Yet the institution remained deeply embedded in society.

Even after World War II, international pressure intensified. The United Nations formally classified slavery as a crime against humanity and estimated that around two million enslaved people still lived in the Arabian Peninsula.

A UN committee investigated the issue in the 1950s and concluded that Oman was violating international law. Britain, despite its official stance against slavery, was criticized for supporting the Sultan while turning a blind eye to the practice.

A British reporter visiting Oman in 1956 observed that some members of the Sultan’s household staff were not free and could not leave their positions.

Only in the late 1960s did reforms begin to take effect, culminating in the abolition of slavery in 1970.

The present

This means that there are still people alive today in Oman who were born into slavery.

And while formal slavery has ended, forms of modern exploitation persist.

According to the Global Slavery Index (2023), more than 6 in every 1,000 people in Oman can be considered victims of modern slavery. That translates to over 30,000 individuals.

Today, this often involves migrant workers brought from Africa or Asia, who, due to legal and financial constraints, may find themselves unable to leave their jobs or return home.

Why this book matters

Celestial Bodies is not only a novel.

It is a quiet, complex record of a society negotiating its past and present. A country that, for decades, remained relatively isolated, now undergoing rapid change.

But change is not linear.

It is uneven. Partial. Marked by what came before.

My rating - 7/10

#Project195 - SAINT LUCIA

Bookeria — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:19:36 GMT

Project195 keeps taking me to places I would never have chosen on my own.

North Korea, where contemporary literature has to be smuggled across closed borders. Somalia, where for centuries poetry passed orally mattered more than the written word. Liechtenstein, where local writers can be counted on one hand.

This time, however, it took me to the Caribbean.

A small island with a large voice

Saint Lucia is a small island in the Caribbean Sea, separated from the Atlantic by a chain of neighboring islands. For over a thousand years before colonization, it was inhabited by Arawak tribes. Later it was “discovered” by the Spanish in the early sixteenth century, possibly even visited by Christopher Columbus during his fourth voyage.

Today, Saint Lucia is an independent country, since 1979, though it remains part of the Commonwealth, with King Charles III as its constitutional monarch. Fewer than 200,000 people live there, speaking English, a local form of French, and Creole.

It is, without question, one of the most picturesque places in the Caribbean.

Expectations and doubts

Many people following my project often point out countries they think will be difficult.

Is it really possible to find a book from every country in the world? Written by a local author, physically published, and available in a language I can actually read?

Even I have doubts sometimes.

Others have attempted similar challenges before, often making compromises along the way. My own criteria are therefore constantly being tested.

But not this time.

Because Saint Lucia turns out to be the home of a Nobel Prize winner in literature.

Derek Walcott

Sir Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in Castries, Saint Lucia. He grew up on the island, far from the centers of Western civilization, though still within the orbit of the British Empire. Both of his grandmothers were descendants of enslaved Africans. His father died when he was still a child, and he was raised by his mother and grandmothers.

He began publishing poetry as a teenager. Later, he studied in Jamaica, moved to Trinidad, worked in theatre, and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. His work, rooted in postcolonial themes and Caribbean identity, gradually gained international recognition, eventually bringing him to Broadway and later to a teaching position at Boston University, where he remained for two decades.

In 1992, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Distinguished Representatives of the Nobel Foundation, Honourable Members of the Academies, the Karolinska Institute and Election Committees, Students, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The honour that you pay me is accepted in the one name that comprises all of the supposedly broken languages of the Caribbean. They cohere in this moment, a moment that recognises their endeavour and one which I receive with pride and humility on their behalf. Pride in the continuing struggle of Antillean writers, humility in the glare of representing them by my own evanescent image.
— Derek Walcott’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1992

Omeros

For this project, I chose Walcott’s most famous work: Omeros (1990).

A monumental epic poem, loosely connected to the works of Homer. Walcott transposes the structure of the Iliad and the Odyssey onto the Caribbean, onto Saint Lucia itself. Fishermen take on the names of Homeric heroes, not as direct replacements, but as echoes.

Yet Omeros is not a traditional epic.

It is a work composed of fragments: multiple voices, narratives, and images woven together. Past and present blend into each other, overlapping and reshaping the story.

Themes of colonialism, slavery, Africa, the British Empire, and everyday island life coexist within the same poetic space.

The result is widely considered one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century.

And yet, I struggled

I approached Omeros with confidence.

Polish is my native language, but I also read fluently in English and Spanish. I assumed that reading Walcott in the original would not be a problem.

I was wrong.

The language is dense, lyrical, shifting between dialects, registers, and perspectives. The narrative refuses to settle into a single line. Even for native English speakers, it can be demanding.

For me, it was overwhelming.

Poet Glyn Maxwell described Walcott’s style like this:

“The verse is constantly trembling with a sense of the body in time, the self slung across metre, whether metre is steps, or nights, or breath, whether lines are days, or years, or tides.”

How to read Omeros

Only after finishing the book did I come across a useful framework proposed by Robert D. Hamner:

Accept that threads will be introduced, abandoned, and returned to later
Read the poem as a study of the poetic mind itself
Focus on the richness of language, rhyme, and rhythm
Recognize the dialogue with epic tradition, both its use and its rejection

Had I known this earlier, I would have approached the book very differently.

A different kind of reading

Despite the difficulty, certain lines and images stayed with me.

They worked on a different level than prose. Less direct, less structured, but more visceral. More emotional.

If I return to Omeros, and I think I will, I will not search for a single story. I will look for the experience of language itself.

Because my problem with poetry may not be a limitation.

It may simply be a challenge.

My rating - 4 / 10

#Project195 - BELGIUM

Bookeria — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:50:54 GMT

For some time now, voices have been growing louder in book media: quality over quantity. We should not compete in the number of books we read. We should not give in to the trend of annual summaries and rankings.

“I read 130 books this year, here are my top 3.”

One good book a month, read carefully, analyzed, and thought through, is supposed to bring more value than fifty books skimmed and shelved.

So how should we think about writers who have produced 500 novels or more?

Between scarcity and excess

In my Project195, I read one book from every country in the world. The goal is simple: to expand reading horizons, to encounter unfamiliar contexts, histories, and perspectives, to reach for books I would never normally pick up in a bookstore.

Sometimes the problem is scarcity. In the case of Liechtenstein, for example, there is essentially a single book translated into a language I can read.

Other times, the problem is the opposite: an overwhelming abundance. Belgium belongs to that category.

Instead of reaching for canonical national novels from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I chose something lighter. Not only to avoid spending an entire month on a single book, but also because Belgium is home to a writer known and appreciated by hundreds of thousands of readers, the creator of one of the most important crime series in literary history.

Georges Simenon.

A writer beyond categories

Simenon, born in 1903 in Liège, is a figure that borders on myth. Over the course of his career, he achieved two things that continue to define his legend: he wrote over 500 novels, and he claimed to have slept with more than 10,000 women.

Before focusing on the sensational, it is worth looking at his craft.

Simenon forces us to ask two separate questions. First: what kind of daily routine allows someone to produce more than sixty pages a day? Second: how does that output avoid becoming mere pulp fiction?

Literary history, if we can still use that term without quotation marks, is full of hyperproductive authors. Many of them are labeled as writers of pulp fiction, commercial literature built for speed, repetition, and sales. Stories constructed from templates, reshuffled endlessly with minor variations.

Examples are easy to find.

Ryoki Inoue, with over 1,100 books across romance, western, and horror.
Barbara Cartland, with more than 700 historical romances.
Corín Tellado, with over 4,000 works centered on love stories.

They achieved immense commercial success, yet rarely entered the literary canon. Today, we might be more inclined to see them as content producers rather than writers.

And yet there are exceptions.

The exception: Simenon

One such exception is Isaac Asimov, a central figure of science fiction, whose output exceeded 500 books across genres.

Simenon belongs, I would argue, in that same category of exceptions.

He is widely regarded as one of the great crime writers of the first half of the twentieth century, often placed alongside Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. His work, unlike most pulp fiction, carries genuine literary weight.

Writing primarily in the noir tradition, Simenon shifted the focus from private detectives to state authority. His most famous character, Inspector Maigret, is not an outsider but a representative of the system.

Through this shift, Simenon offered more than mystery plots. He provided a portrait of Belgian and French society, a glimpse into the workings of the police, and a reflection on the role of the state in confronting crime.

His influence on later European and American crime writers is difficult to overstate.

Discipline as method

How, then, did he sustain both quantity and quality?

Simenon approached writing with near-obsessive discipline.

He prepared his workspace meticulously, whether in one of the more than thirty homes he lived in across different countries. An IBM typewriter. Telephone directories used as sources for names and addresses. Pipes and tobacco, ever-present in photographs.

He selected names in advance, wrote them down on his characteristic yellow sheets of paper, and only the next day began writing.

The plot, he claimed, arrived naturally. He never planned it in advance. He searched first for the right names, for sounds that felt true both spoken and written.

Each morning, he would isolate himself, hang a “Do not disturb” sign on the door, and write relentlessly. No revisions. No corrections. Up to ninety words per minute. A novel could take anywhere from a few days to a month.

At times, he would write an entire book wearing the same shirt, freshly washed and pressed each day, waiting for him in the morning.

He described his method simply:

“It is almost a geometrical problem. I have such a man, such a woman, in such surroundings. What can happen to them to oblige them to go to their limit?”

Sketches and mosaics

Interestingly, Simenon saw his detective novels as sketches, something like quick drawings made for friends.

His true artistic ambitions, he claimed, were realized in longer, more psychological novels such as Red Lights, The Death of Belle, or The Clockmaker of Everton, written during his years in the United States.

And yet, taken together, his entire body of work forms something larger.

“I will never write a big novel. My big novel is the mosaic of all my small novels.”

The man and the myth

And what of the famous 10,000 women?

Simenon once said:

“I literally suffered from knowing there were millions of women in the world that I would never know.”

Much of this was likely exaggeration, though a significant number of his relationships involved sex workers. His private life, marked by infidelity tolerated by his wives and partners, would today likely be interpreted differently.

Still, it contributed to the myth of a writer defined by excess, both in life and in work.

A small piece of a larger whole

The novel I read for Belgium was Maigret Gets Angry. In many ways, an ordinary crime novel.

But it is difficult to judge it in isolation. It feels more like a fragment of something much larger, part of a vast literary system built over decades.

My rating - 5.5 / 10

#Project195 - SPAIN

Bookeria — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:53:28 GMT

Traveling the world in search of literary gems from every country on the globe, sooner or later I had to arrive in Spain. That virtual journey, in turn, pushed me to finally read a book that had been looking at me from my shelf for years. A global bestseller, one of the most famous books of all time ever written by Spanish authors: La sombra del viento, published in 2001 by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

A novel rescued from forgetting

The first novel in the four-volume cycle The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, although it did not initially receive overwhelming praise from literary critics, ultimately became an international hit and is still regarded today as one of the most important literary works of the twenty-first century.

The novel tells the story of a little boy whose father takes him to a mysterious building where Barcelona’s passionate booksellers maintain the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, an almost secret institution whose supreme purpose is to protect the last surviving copies of books forgotten by readers. It is there that the memory of our civilization is guarded, and the work of writers lost to the passage of time is preserved. It is there that our protagonist, Daniel Sempere, finds a mysterious novel by Julián Carax titled The Shadow of the Wind.

Over the following pages, we follow Daniel as he grows up in postwar Barcelona, trying at once to uncover the story of the vanished and enigmatic Carax and to understand why his own fate is so tightly bound to the life of that writer. Gradually, what unfolds before us is a story of great love, friendship, and sacrifice, but also of betrayal, violence, and murder.

Literature as mystery, witness, and victim

The rich language, the dark, gothic atmosphere of Barcelona full of ruins, shadows, and secrets, draws us into a world that no longer exists, yet comes alive again on the pages of Zafón’s novel. The author carefully weaves together the stories of his characters, leading the reader by the hand while never allowing too much to be guessed in advance. Zafón constructs a kind of nested literary mystery in which the chief suspect, the key evidence, and the final victim is literature itself. And it was precisely this motif that caught my attention from the very first pages.

How many cursed writers like Julián Carax are there in the world? How many forgotten books still conceal extraordinary stories? How many of them have been condemned to eternal oblivion? And finally: why write more, if literary graveyards already have no room left to bury the ones we have?

The scale of forgetting

In 2004, Google set itself the goal of cataloguing and digitizing every book in existence. The Google Books Library Project was meant to become the world’s greatest modern Library of Alexandria in digital form, a record of the memory and knowledge of all humanity, and a tool for the democratization of knowledge for present and future generations. Of course, copyright issues, the lack of expert editorial oversight, and numerous errors in the scanned works inevitably led to controversy. Even so, in 2010 the digital giant announced that its index contained more than 130 million items. One hundred and thirty million books. In 2019, after more than fifteen years of work, its digital catalogue already counted more than 40 million scanned and fully digitized books. Today, all of them serve artificial intelligence as a training base and a source of data.

UNESCO data shows that for over a dozen years now, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 traditional books have been published annually on average. This does not include titles published independently by authors without the help of professional publishing houses. If we were to include those as well, the total number of titles published each year in recent years would rise to nearly 4 million books. So even if we assume one million new novels, reportages, children’s books, and guides, each with its own unique ISBN, then from Google’s first count in 2010 the total number of books in the world would now stand at around 146 million.

This is, of course, only an assumption, in fact, one almost impossible to verify beyond doubt. And yet it remains a fairly conservative one. So we have more than 146 million books in the world that we could read. I will repeat it for the third time: more than 146 million books.

How many of them end up in the cemetery of forgotten books each year? How many were published in only a few hundred copies and still lie today, gathering dust in warehouses? And how many were turned into waste paper so that other writers could use that paper once again, trying their own hand and hoping to save their work from oblivion?

Why write at all?

We will not be able to answer these questions. We may assume that the answer is: most of them. Levels of readership remain very low in most countries. Consuming stories in audiovisual form is simpler. Faster and cheaper to produce, easier to absorb, more profitable in both marketing and economic terms.

So why write books at all? Is it worth adding one more to the 146 million already published? What sense does that make?

Well, to me, The Shadow of the Wind is the author’s manifesto, an attempt to prove that it is worth it. Perhaps years later, perhaps even many decades after the author’s own death, someone’s hands will reach deep into a dusty shelf and pull out a story forgotten by the world. A story that, like Julián Carax’s work, will not only be accidentally saved from oblivion, but will change a reader’s life.

Just one.

But that is enough.

My rating: 6,5/10

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* Translated from Polish with AI

#Project195 - IRAN

Bookeria — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:35:42 GMT

The year 2026 is yet another moment when Iran and its difficult relationship with the United States dominate headlines. What we are witnessing now resembles an almost full-scale conflict, involving not only the two primary sides, but also their allies and regional neighbors.

So what can still be said about this war, and about Iran itself, that has not already been repeated across news media?

A novel shaped by censorship

I read Thirst (published in Poland as Idąc na rzeź) by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, released by the Polish publisher Artrage as part of its Rahla series. The novel waited nearly a decade for publication due to regime censorship.

In this short work, closer to a novella than a full-length novel, we follow a group of soldiers trapped on the front lines during the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s. Men from opposing sides, exposed to each other’s gunfire, wait for a chance to reach a water tanker and quench their unbearable thirst.

At the same time, we follow the narrator, a writer caught between truth and censorship. As Artrage notes, the book also becomes a meta-narrative about journalists, writers, and all those who fight with words during wartime.

A different literary perspective

What I found most compelling was not only the story itself, but what it revealed about Iranian national literature.

In 1990, near the end of the brutal conflict between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state institution was established in Tehran: the Foundation for the Preservation and Publication of Sacred Defense Works and Values.

Its purpose was to preserve and promote the values of what the regime calls the “Sacred Defense”, encouraging future generations to embrace ideals of sacrifice, jihad, and martyrdom in service of the republic.

Literature as ideology

Out of this effort emerged what is now referred to as “Sacred Defense literature”, effectively a state-supported literary genre.

At the same time, Iran saw the creation of museums dedicated to wartime heroism, official funerals for martyrs, and organized visits to key sites of the conflict. Literature became only one part, albeit an important one, of a broader ideological and propagandistic strategy.

The foundational myth of the Iran–Iraq War draws heavily on the Battle of Karbala, where Husayn ibn Ali was killed and later revered in Shia Islam as the “Master of Martyrs.”

This narrative continues to shape Iranian national identity, framing modern conflicts as extensions of a historical struggle between martyrdom and oppression.

War as narrative

Within this framework, the Iran–Iraq War is presented not as a geopolitical conflict, but as a moral one: a battle of good versus evil.

The regime’s narrative glorifies Iranian sacrifice while demonizing its enemies, including Saddam Hussein and Iraqi forces.

This ideological lens has deeply influenced Iranian poetry, prose, and cultural production in the postwar period.

Writing against the myth

Dowlatabadi’s Thirst stands in opposition to this narrative.

For a state that relies on conflict as a source of identity and unity, wars like Karbala, the Iran–Iraq War, and even present tensions with the United States are placed on a single continuous line of meaning.

Dowlatabadi disrupts this continuity.

He strips the myth of the Sacred Defense of its religious and nationalist pathos. Instead of heroism, he presents exhaustion, fear, and above all, thirst, a physical, almost primitive force that reduces soldiers on both sides to the same human condition.

Through this, he invites a deeper reflection on Iranian identity, one that moves beyond ideology.

My rating - 5.5/10

#Project195 - MALTA

Bookeria — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:13:21 GMT

When I decided to begin Project195, my literary journey through every country in the world, I did not expect it to take me to places as unexpected as this one.

Malta — a small island state in the Mediterranean. Known for its almost mythical history of knights, later for British rule, and today mostly for beaches and cheap flights from continental Europe.

And yet, it was in Malta that I came across one of the best, if not the best, pieces of reportage I have ever read.

A book that meets every rule

In Project195, I follow a few simple rules:

the book should be written by an author born in the country
it should be available in a language I can read
it should exist as a physical edition
and finally, it should be important for that country

What does “important” mean?

I try to choose books that offer more than just a compelling story. Books that help me understand local history, culture, and contexts that were previously unfamiliar to me.

A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice (2023), written by Maltese journalist Paul Caruana Galizia, fulfills all of these criteria.

A personal and political investigation

This reportage is a deeply personal journey into the author’s own family history and the life of his mother, the prominent Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered in a car bomb attack in 2017 because of her work.

The book operates on two levels.

On one hand, it is an intimate account of grief, a son trying to process the loss of his mother. On the other, it is a detailed investigation into corruption, political connections, and the broader reality of a country that remains largely unknown to outsiders.

Through these two intertwined narratives, we are introduced to Malta as a tightly interconnected system, where politicians, businessmen, journalists, activists, police, and criminals all exist within a web of relationships that is difficult to separate.

A state in crisis

The Malta portrayed in this book is a country in crisis.

Its institutions appear democratic, but often only on the surface. The values it presents outwardly seem carefully staged, shaped for its image within the European Union and among international tourists and investors.

The investigation surrounding the Panama Papers becomes a crucial turning point, exposing connections between political elites and international organized crime.

And yet, despite its political depth, the book remains, above all, a story of grief unfolding alongside an investigation.

A perfectly constructed work of reportage with elements of personal essay.

A story that is not unique

The story of Daphne Caruana Galizia is extraordinary.

But it is not unique.

According to UNESCO data, more than 1,856 journalists have been killed worldwide since 1993 because of their work. In 2026 alone, as of April 3, at least 10 have already lost their lives.

I was personally surprised to learn that in Poland, where I come from, six journalists have been murdered since the 1980s. I had never heard those stories before. I am probably not alone in that.

Recent years offer little hope for improvement.

The war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, tensions involving Iran, and numerous ongoing local conflicts around the world continue to increase the number of journalists killed, especially in conflict zones.

It must also be said clearly that in these statistics, Israel stands out. In 2025 alone, it was responsible for the deaths of more than 86 Palestinian journalists, accounting for nearly 80% of such killings globally.

Why this matters

These numbers are overwhelming.

But they matter.

Because behind every number is a person. A life. A story. Someone who, like Daphne Caruana Galizia, chose to confront crime, corruption, and power.

They died so that we could still have access to truth in a world increasingly shaped by disinformation, conflicting narratives, and algorithm-driven content.

Not every one of them will have someone like Paul Caruana Galizia to tell their story and pursue justice.

My rating - 9.5 / 10

#Project195 - VIETNAM

Bookeria — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:01:42 GMT

Bao Ninh’s novel was published worldwide in 1990 - exactly ten years after PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) was officially recognized as a distinct psychiatric diagnosis.

Why does this matter? Because literature - and war novels in particular - have played a significant role not only in systematizing knowledge about trauma-related disorders, but also in documenting the evolution of how psychology and psychiatry perceive them.

But let’s begin at the beginning.

Project195 and Vietnam

As part of my Project195, I read one meaningful book from every country in the world. Whenever possible, I try to choose a work that interests me personally, is available in translation and in physical form (so I can present it to my readers and viewers), and at the same time represents its country in a meaningful way for an international audience.

Vietnam - the next stop on my journey - evokes for most of us one of three associations: exceptional (if admittedly rich) cuisine, postcard-perfect images of beaches, rice fields and rainforests… or the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War, in reality a series of conflicts on the Indochinese Peninsula between 1955 and 1975, was fought between the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). It is doubtful that many people worldwide would know much about the conflict today were it not for the heavy involvement of the United States on the side of the South.

To this day, it is often called the American–Vietnamese War. Its causes, course, and consequences reshaped not only American domestic policy but also the broader socio-cultural and political landscape of the late twentieth century. It is difficult to point to any major American development in the following decades whose indirect roots cannot be traced, at least in part, back to this distant conflict in Southeast Asia.

Given the magnitude of these events, I could not resist reaching for Bao Ninh’s 1990 novel The Sorrow of War.

A War Novel That Feels Like Trauma Itself

The Sorrow of War is unquestionably one of the most important war novels in modern literature and one of the most significant books ever written in Vietnam.

Bao Ninh is himself a veteran of the Vietnam War (or, as it is known in Vietnam, the American War). His novel tells the story of the war, his nation, and in many ways, his own experience.

The protagonist, Kien, is a young North Vietnamese soldier - one of only a handful of survivors from a unit of over six hundred men. After the war, he attempts to confront his memories by writing about them. But instead of a coherent narrative, we receive a collage of recollections: fragmented, nonlinear, chaotic. A stream of consciousness that moves between before, during, and after the war.

Rather than a story about PTSD, the novel becomes an experience of PTSD.

War in this book is not merely a historical backdrop. It is the source of psychological disintegration. It marks the end of youthful hopes and the collapse of identity. The banality of death, violence, and injustice does not simply push the protagonist to the edge - it irreversibly destroys any illusion of a return to normality.

The past remains vivid - in trenches, jungles, fields of death - yet at the same time it dissolves into memory exercises, into a liminal space between dream and nightmare. It loses coherence, perhaps even meaning. It becomes a curse.

The Sorrow of War is a remarkable novel, worth reading regardless of literary taste. But it also deserves to be read from another perspective.

PTSD in Literature - A Much Older Story

In a scholarly article by Tomasz Kucmin and colleagues, we find a fascinating overview of trauma and post-traumatic disorders in literature. Their research suggests that depictions of PTSD-like symptoms can be traced back to the oldest surviving texts.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2000 BCE), we encounter Gilgamesh’s anguish over the death of Enkidu:

“How can I be silent? How can I find peace?
My beloved friend has turned to dust.
Shall I not also die and lie down never to rise again?”

Similar descriptions appear in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, in Herodotus, and in various books of the Bible.

For centuries, what we now call PTSD was described through language of fear, guilt, restlessness, intrusive memories, nightmares. We see it in Shakespeare, Goethe, Dickens. Yet it was only after the First and Second World Wars - conflicts unprecedented in scale and brutality - that trauma entered both literary canon and medical vocabulary in new ways.

Terms such as shell shock, battle fatigue, war neurosis, and cannonball wind syndrome became attempts to capture the psychological devastation of modern warfare.

Few examples are more obvious than Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Remarque’s words resonate powerfully:

“Anxiety grows in me. A terrible feeling of estrangement suddenly grips me. I cannot find my place; I am excluded. However much I beg and strain, nothing moves; I sit there indifferent and sad like a condemned man, and the past turns away from me.”

By the time PTSD entered official psychiatric classification in 1980, literature had already been describing it - for millennia.

And Yet - Something Changes with Bao Ninh

Trauma, despite its relatively recent diagnostic label, has a long and tragic literary history.

But I would argue that Bao Ninh brings it to another level. He does not simply bring readers closer to traumatic experience. He transforms trauma into narrative structure itself. The fragmentation, the disorientation, the collapse of chronology - these are not stylistic flourishes. They are the embodiment of psychological damage.

In that sense, The Sorrow of War is not merely about PTSD.

It is written in its language.

Rating: 7 / 10

#Project195 - HUNGARY

Bookeria — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:25:31 GMT

Let me explain what I mean.

As part of my Project195, I read one meaningful book from every country in the world. I decided to take this opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and reach for one of the most famous novels by the latest Hungarian Nobel Prize laureate in literature - László Krasznahorkai.

Before I justify the somewhat provocative thesis from the headline, I want to briefly discuss Satantango itself - the novel I chose to represent Hungary - and say a few words about the author.

László Krasznahorkai - Background

Krasznahorkai was born in southern Hungary in 1954, in the small town of Gyula, which today has just over thirty thousand inhabitants - and over seventy years ago, likely even fewer. This is not an irrelevant detail, as it may help us contextualize the atmosphere of Satantango. Interestingly, Gyula is also the birthplace of Ferenc Erkel, composer of the Hungarian national anthem, as well as the father of the world-famous German painter Albrecht Dürer.

After completing his early education, young László studied law for two years before ultimately earning his degree in the humanities. Around that time, his first novella, Tebenned hittem, was published.

It is worth remembering that Krasznahorkai’s youth coincided with the communist rule of János Kádár. Despite the harsh post-war repression, Hungary gradually became one of the more liberal countries of the Eastern Bloc. Amnesty for prisoners, partial economic liberalization, and the introduction of limited capitalist mechanisms turned this Central European state into a relative oasis of freedom and prosperity.

During this period, Krasznahorkai worked as a documentary editor at the major Hungarian publishing house Gondolat Könyvkiadó. Only in 1982, at the age of twenty-eight, did he become a fully independent writer. A few years later, he left Hungary for the first time and traveled to West Berlin. From that moment on, Germany effectively became his second home, although he frequently changed his place of residence and spent time in countries such as France, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, China, Japan, and the Netherlands. His international recognition grew steadily over time.

Satantango - The Novel

Satantango was first published in 1985, shortly before Krasznahorkai’s move to Berlin. It is his first fully fledged novel and, in many ways, his passport into the salons of world literature. In my view, there is no better starting point for a literary journey with this author.

On the surface, Satantango is a simple story about a forgotten Hungarian town — or rather, a small settlement and its tight-knit local community. Time stands still there, hope rots from lack of prospects, and the last chance for people sunk in sadness and despair arrives with the return of the mysterious Irimiás.

Irimiás is the central figure of the novel - a false prophet whose lies the villagers need more than brutal truth. They follow him into a whirlwind of events, entrusting him with their lives and futures while waiting for a transformation of their tragic fate.

As mentioned, the plot appears simple. Yet from Krasznahorkai’s pen emerges a total novel - one that confronts themes such as the collapse of community, morality, and history. We observe a world after the apocalypse, without any actual apocalypse. There is no single catastrophic event that led the inhabitants to their unenviable situation. Their condition is the result of years of slow decay and stagnation.

How much did growing up in a small town - forgotten not only by the world but perhaps even by Hungary itself - influence the writer and Satantango? We will probably never know. Still, it is difficult for me to believe that his personal experiences did not somehow seep into the pages of this novel.

If you seek Literature with a capital “L,” Satantango will challenge you.

But Was the Nobel Prize Deserved?

The question remains whether the Nobel Prize was entirely justified, or whether it might sometimes follow an unwritten geopolitical pattern - one in which the Swedish Academy pays more attention to an author’s country of origin than to the intrinsic value of their work.

Reading the Academy’s official statement, we learn that Krasznahorkai received the award particularly “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

I do not wish to diminish his achievements in any way. Yet I cannot help wondering whether, in part, it was simply his turn.

Let us look at the statistics compiled by Areppim:
https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_nobelxlitxnation.htm

Nobel Prizes in Literature - By Nation

From 1901 to 2025, a total of 122 writers have received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The data unmistakably shows that France, the United States, and the United Kingdom lead this ranking. The next ten positions are also occupied primarily by European countries. The only non-European nations (excluding the United States) with more than one Nobel laureate in literature are Chile, Canada, Japan, South Africa, and China - each with two recipients.

Viewed differently, the distribution becomes even more striking:

Out of 122 laureates, 97 came from Europe. If we were to include Turkey, or writers permanently residing in Europe such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, the numbers would look even more lopsided. Another roughly 10% belongs to the United States.

This means that over 70% of all Nobel Prizes in Literature go to European authors. Nearly 80% if we combine Europe and the United States.

So - are we talking about the Nobel Prize, or the NATO Prize?

A Fair Criticism?

This accusation is not entirely unfounded. It has been raised repeatedly, both in relation to literature and to the Peace Prize. The Nobel distinction is undeniably a powerful PR and marketing instrument. It shapes literary trends and interests, but also influences soft power and the global perception of Western culture.

Of course, one could argue the opposite: perhaps European literature is simply stronger, or statistically produces more writers due to centuries-long literary traditions, higher readership levels, and larger publishing markets.

Still, it is worth examining one more statistic - Nobel Prizes in Literature over the last 25 years, that is, in the 21st century. Has the tendency shifted?

In the past quarter-century, 17 out of 25 awards went to writers from Europe or the United States. Excluding dual citizenships. With stricter classification, that number could rise to 19. As we can see, very little changes - and the prize for László Krasznahorkai seems to confirm this pattern.

Perhaps in the coming years we will again see a lesser-known laureate from South America, Asia, or Africa. Yet it may well be just a comma before another wave of awards for already established European authors.

Despite my own natural Eurocentrism - I am Polish and a proud compatriot of five Nobel laureates - I believe literature from outside Europe deserves far more attention.

Why Project195 Exists

Project195 is one of my tools for promoting precisely that literature - showing that extraordinary stories, talents, and works are created even in places that may seem distant or exotic to us. Great literature does not belong to a single continent.

My rating: 7.5 / 10

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#Project195 - UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Bookeria — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:44:45 GMT

Choosing a book from the United States for my Project195 turned out to be unexpectedly difficult. What should one pick from a country so densely packed with literary giants?

A nineteenth-century classic by Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Mark Twain? A twentieth-century Nobel laureate such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, or Faulkner? Or perhaps something more contemporary: McCarthy, Roth, DeLillo, Pynchon?

For a moment, I even considered leaning into controversy - American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

In the end, reason prevailed.

Most contemporary American novels have already passed through my hands. I have made materials about almost the entire bibliographies of Hemingway, McCarthy, and Steinbeck - writers who belong among my absolute favorites of all time. So I decided to reach for something I might not have picked up without the structure and discipline imposed by this project.

It was time for Moby-Dick.

A Book That Changes With Every Reading

There are books you read once, place back on the shelf, and never feel the urge to return to.
And then there are books you can read again and again - each time arriving at different conclusions.

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) unquestionably belongs to the latter category.

Out of sheer obligation, let me briefly summarize the plot - though doing so barely scratches the surface of what this novel truly is.

Moby-Dick is one of the most ambitious novels in literary history—certainly in American literature. It is simultaneously a maritime epic, a philosophical treatise, a nineteenth-century encyclopedia of whaling, and a partially adventurous tale of a journey into the unknown.

The Voyage of the Pequod

The narrator, Ishmael, signs on to a whaling ship named the Pequod on the island of Nantucket, off the eastern coast of the United States, roughly between Boston and New York. Though inexperienced in the whaling trade, his openness, resourcefulness, and hunger for adventure convince the ship’s owners to take him aboard for a multi-year voyage across the oceans.

The Pequod is commanded by the mysterious Captain Ahab, a man who lost his leg years earlier to the legendary white whale known as Moby Dick. Moving with the aid of a wooden prosthesis, Ahab proves to be utterly consumed by his desire for revenge. What begins as a commercial expedition quickly transforms into a suicidal crusade against nature itself.

Melville’s Experience at Sea

Melville drew heavily from his own life. In 1839, he signed onto a merchant ship and later a whaling vessel. He even experienced a remarkable episode in which, after deserting his ship, he lived among the indigenous inhabitants of a Polynesian island.

While autobiographical elements matter, what matters more is the lived experience Melville poured onto the page. The sea in Moby-Dick is not imagined - it is known.

Where the Real Adventure Begins

Once the plot summary ends, the real journey with this novel begins.

I have no intention of offering yet another comprehensive analysis of Moby-Dick. The number of themes contained within it is virtually inexhaustible:

Ahab as the embodiment of absolute obsession and the will to dominate the world
Moby Dick as a symbol of God, nature, evil, emptiness, the absolute, or the unattainable
Ishmael as observer, ironist, and curious outsider
The sea as a metaphysical, boundless, chaotic space
The ship’s officers as symbols of an emerging American identity
The Pequod as a metaphor for American colonialism and the destruction of Indigenous peoples
The whaling crew as an allegory of class relations and capitalism
Queequeg as the so-called “savage,” a counterpoint to civilization

And these are only the first that come to mind.

The uniqueness of Moby-Dick lies precisely in this multiplicity. Every reader discovers something different. Its interpretive potential is limitless. Depending on when it is read, the novel absorbs the fears, ideas, and tensions of its time - becoming, in a sense, immortal.

A Novel for Every Lens

Interested in Marxist theory?
Look at the relationship between the ship’s owners - investors safely waving from shore - and the whalers risking their lives at sea for a fraction of the profit.

Critical of colonialism?
Consider the name Pequod, taken from a Native American tribe annihilated by colonizers in the very region from which the ship departs. Or examine Queequeg, mocked as a savage yet the most skilled and morally grounded man aboard.

What about race?
Do we actually know Captain Ahab’s skin color? Scattered clues across hundreds of pages suggest the possibility that he may have been Black - and that concealing this fact may itself be one of the novel’s deepest games with the reader.

Or perhaps you are searching for something even more fundamental: questions about existence, meaning, and faith.
Ask yourself - what exactly is Moby Dick? Is the elusive whale, appearing only to a chosen few, truly just an animal?

A Book Larger Than Life

So what was Melville’s intention?
Is there one correct interpretation?

I don’t believe so.

Melville created something larger than a single story. He wrote a book larger than life itself - a book that endures regardless of how the world around it changes.

For me, at this point in my life, Moby-Dick is a window into literature itself. No single interpretation feels more convincing than another. The sheer abundance of possible readings is the greatest revelation.

Melville showed me that it is possible to write something seemingly flawed - uneven, stylistically questionable at times - and still create something truly great.

My rating: 8/10

#Project195 - CONGO

Bookeria — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 07:58:10 GMT

Project195 keeps taking me to places that feel increasingly distant and unfamiliar. Often, these are countries I will probably never visit in person. That is precisely why literature matters here more than anywhere else. I am far more interested in how a country looks through the eyes of its own writers than through the lenses of Instagram travelers hunting for cheap sensations.

This time, the literary journey led me to Congo. Since the name itself can be misleading, it is worth clarifying that this is the Republic of the Congo, located on the western coast of Africa, formerly known as French Congo and, after gaining independence in 1960, as Congo Brazzaville.

Beyond vague associations with regional conflicts and its proximity to former Zaire, my knowledge of the country was limited. That made Alain Mabanckou’s novel Broken Glass (Verre Cassé), already translated into many languages, all the more intriguing.

Alain Mabanckou. A Congolese Voice in the World

Alain Mabanckou was born in the Republic of the Congo in 1966. According to his biography, by the age of six he already spoke several African languages and later added French. He studied literature and philosophy at the local Karl Marx University, a telling detail in a country that effectively belonged to the Eastern Bloc until the early 1990s.

Thanks to a scholarship, he continued his education in France, leaving Congo at the age of twenty two. He debuted in the late 1990s with Bleu Blanc Rouge, which earned him his first literary award. More than twenty years ago, he moved from France to the United States, where since 2002 he has lived and worked at the University of Michigan.

A Window into Congolese Society

I read Broken Glass in Polish translation and like many books in this project, it became a window into a society I knew almost nothing about.

This is, without a doubt, a novel about social and deeply personal problems faced by Congolese people.

The book is simultaneously a farce, a political satire and a playful homage to world literature, which Mabanckou constantly references. Yet beneath its bravado and originality, written as a nearly uninterrupted stream of sentences with minimal punctuation, emerges a bleak story of alcoholism and human decline.

Broken Glass. The Man and the Microcosm

The title character, Broken Glass, is both the protagonist and narrator. Most of the story unfolds in a local bar he frequents and in the area around his home. A former teacher, a self appointed urban chronicler and above all an alcoholic, Broken Glass embodies social collapse.

On the most immediate level, the novel tells the story of an individual downfall. An outsider rejected by family and community, seeking understanding among bar regulars and at the bottom of yet another glass.

The bar itself functions as a microcosm of Congo, and more broadly of postcolonial sub Saharan Africa. Alcohol becomes both an escape from the absurdity of reality and a filter through which the protagonist is able to speak the truth and name things as they are.

Satire Without Illusions

The novel’s second layer is a sharp social diagnosis delivered through irony and grotesque humor.

There is no nostalgia here.
No sentimental attachment to the homeland.

Instead of exoticism, the reader encounters dirt, laughter, disappointment and disillusionment.

Mabanckou mercilessly exposes Congolese society. Authoritarian regimes. Political absurdity. The hypocrisy of local elites. He looks at his country through the eyes of a defeated man who has no illusions left and therefore no reason to lie.

Language, Form and Drunken Rhythm

The third layer of the novel lies in its language and form. The absence of periods and conventional punctuation unleashes a stream of consciousness that perfectly mirrors the rhythm of drunken speech, intoxication and mental chaos. Past memories and present judgments blur together.

At the same time, the book is densely packed with references to world literature. Magical realism in the spirit of García Márquez, Zola’s naturalism and Beckett’s existentialism collide with descriptions of Congolese slums filled with prostitution, mud and decay.

The contrast is startling.
And deeply effective.

Alcohol as a Silent Protagonist

Beneath these three layers lies something else.
A warning.

Choosing an absurd, humorous alcoholic as the narrator is, of course, a literary device. But it also points to a real and growing problem in sub Saharan Africa. Alcoholism.

One might argue that compared to poverty, corruption, exploitation of national resources, dependence on global powers, pandemics, child mortality, lack of clean water, HIV, domestic violence, wars and ethnic cleansing, alcohol abuse seems almost trivial.

At first glance, statistics appear to support this view. Alcohol ranks only around fiftieth among direct causes of death in Congo, behind drowning, skin diseases and suicide.

But dismissing it would be a mistake.

According to WHO, Statista and reports cited by Business Insider, excessive alcohol consumption has become a regular and growing issue in Congo. Alongside Equatorial Guinea, the country has recently ranked among the highest globally for binge drinking, defined as consuming more than 1.5 liters of alcohol in a single occasion within a thirty day period.

In 2024, nearly 44 percent of surveyed Congolese reported episodic heavy drinking.

The problem is not only the quantity.
It is the pattern.

Binge drinking has become a normalized part of celebrations, social gatherings and everyday life.

Given the young demographic structure of African countries, including Congo, this trend is likely to intensify. It will affect education, cognitive development, violence levels and a range of social pathologies closely linked to alcohol abuse.

WHO data further shows that while a smaller proportion of Africans drink alcohol compared to Western Europe, often for religious or cultural reasons, those who do drink tend to consume far larger quantities.

The Invisible Main Character

This is the tension that permeates nearly every page of Broken Glass.

Alcohol is not merely a literary tool.
It is an invisible and silent protagonist.

Without it, we would not hear Broken Glass’s voice.
Without it, Broken Glass would not exist.

The lingering question remains.

Would he have stayed a respected teacher and a pillar of society without alcohol?
Or would we still find him standing on a street corner, depressed, defeated and silent?

My rating: 6.5/10

Sources

World Health Organization – Alcohol
https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/alcohol
BBC – Alcohol and Africa
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24083170
World Life Expectancy – Congo
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/country-health-profile/congo
Business Insider Africa – Heavy Drinking
https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/lifestyle/african-countries-on-global-list-of-heaviest-drinkers/ff4wmk6

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* Translated from Polish wih AI.

#Project195 - EGYPT

Bookeria — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:16:15 GMT

Although Egypt is a country whose history and culture stretch back several millennia, its modern literary canon can boast only one writer awarded the most prestigious of all literary honors: the Nobel Prize. That writer is Naguib Mahfouz.

Over the course of his long life - more than ninety-four years - Mahfouz produced an extraordinary body of work: over 35 novels, 350 short stories, 26 screenplays, 7 plays, and hundreds of articles, essays, and journalistic texts published in countless periodicals. To this day, he remains an undisputed icon of modern Arabic literature worldwide.

What far fewer people know, however, is that his writing - so deeply rooted in Egyptian history and social reality - ultimately led to an attempt on his life.

But first, some context.

Project195 and the Choice of Mahfouz

As part of my Project195, I aim to read one book from every country in the world. When choosing a title, it is crucial to me that the book be as significant as possible to the country itself - its culture, history, and readers.

In the case of Egypt, there was nothing to deliberate. I had to choose one of Mahfouz’s many works.

Mahfouz was born in 1911, the youngest of seven children, into the family of a government official in Cairo. At the time, Egypt was a British colony, and British soldiers were a constant presence in the capital’s daily landscape. He grew up in the streets of the old city; only thirteen years after his birth did his family move to the outskirts of Cairo. The climate, smells, sounds, and images of his childhood would echo throughout his novels for the rest of his life and largely define their uniqueness. Autobiographical elements are, in fact, a frequent feature of his most famous works.

Mahfouz’s mother was the daughter of a Cairo sheikh responsible for one of the city’s most important mosques, Al-Azhar. He therefore grew up in a deeply religious - by today’s standards, perhaps even radically religious - household. This background profoundly influenced both his later writing and his perception of the sweeping socio-cultural changes that would soon transform the region. In one interview, Mahfouz famously remarked:

“You would never have thought that an artist would emerge from that family.”

I would add that it is equally astonishing that such an artist could emerge with such a conscious and critical view of religion itself.

To avoid recounting an entire biography - something that would require a book of its own - it is worth mentioning one more formative episode from Mahfouz’s childhood.

When he was just seven years old, in 1919, Egypt erupted into a long-simmering independence revolution that ultimately led to British recognition of Egyptian statehood in 1922. Although Mahfouz was only a child, the sound of gunfire directed at demonstrators on the very streets he walked to school left a permanent mark on his psyche.

Cairo, Religion, Revolution

These three elements - Cairo, religion, and revolution - are clearly present in the first volume of his Cairo Trilogy, which I had the pleasure of reading: The Palace Walk (Bayn al-Qasrayn, 1956).

Both the novel itself and the entire trilogy are widely regarded as among the greatest achievements of twentieth-century Egyptian literature. The story unfolds in one of Cairo’s old districts, from the time of the First World War up to the outbreak of the independence revolution. We follow several generations of the Abd al-Jawad family -characters who captivate not only through the literary beauty and realism of their relationships, but also as an allegory of Egypt’s broader social, religious, and political transformations during this period.

Mahfouz’s narrative style - realist yet rich in symbolism and infused with the rhythm of the Arabic language - places him firmly among the giants of world literature. For me, he stands alongside Proust (a personal comparison) and figures such as Tolstoy or Balzac. Walking through Cairo with Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family, we do not merely observe a vanished world; we taste local spices, feel the heat of summer air on our skin, and hear the sounds of a chaotic, overcrowded metropolis. His language is fluid, delicate, and lyrical, yet precise and profoundly human. At times, it feels as if we are standing behind the characters, listening to their conversations firsthand. Thanks to Mahfouz’s prose, early-twentieth-century Cairo becomes not just a backdrop, but one of the novel’s central characters.

Islam also plays a crucial role - specifically the way its culture, law, and traditions shape not only the actions of the characters, but their identities and their understanding of themselves and the world. In The Palace Walk, Mahfouz portrays radical generational change: from a patriarchal order in which women are effectively confined to their homes, to a reality where fleeting romances are accepted and even expected as markers of modernity and social confidence. These contrasts highlight how important feminist themes were to Mahfouz, and how acutely aware he was of inequality, injustice, and hypocrisy -particularly striking given his upbringing.

The final pillar of the novel is its placement within the national liberation movement and the independence revolution itself. Throughout the book, Mahfouz weaves motifs of national pride, identity, and the allure of modernity, including its political dimensions. Only in the novel’s closing moments, however, does he fully reveal what it means, in his view, to be Egyptian - and what the true cost of national pride and independence is when measured against the barrel of a rifle.

From Literature to Violence

I write all this not merely to encourage reading Mahfouz - his literary value is beyond dispute - but to sketch a portrait of an artist whose worldview was embedded in his fiction. That portrait proved so controversial that it eventually led to an attempt on his life.

In 1988, the world encountered another controversial literary work: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Inspired in part by the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the novel was acclaimed by critics and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, yet it simultaneously provoked a wave of hatred from radical Islamist groups.

After Iran’s supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini issued a death fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, the writer became a prime target for Islamist extremists worldwide. His books were burned, protests erupted across Muslim-majority countries, and in 1991 his Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was murdered. Rushdie himself survived multiple assassination attempts, including the 2022 attack - more than thirty years after the novel’s publication - that left him blind in one eye and paralyzed in one hand.

One of the indirect victims of this wave of hatred was Naguib Mahfouz.

Children of Gebelawi and the Fatwa

As early as 1959, Mahfouz had published another major novel, Children of Gebelawi (Children of the Alley). The book tells the story of the three Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - through an allegory set in a nineteenth-century Cairo alley.

Originally published in serialized form, the novel immediately drew fierce criticism from religious circles. After intervention by then-president Gamal Abdel Nasser, its publication as a book was halted in Egypt. Lebanon was the only Muslim-majority country to publish the novel, which it did in 1967.

In 1989, the book became the basis for a formal condemnation by Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh”, a radical cleric associated with the terrorist organization Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (later responsible, among other acts, for the 1997 Luxor massacre in which nearly sixty people were killed).

During the Rushdie controversy, Rahman remarked:

“If this sentence had been passed on Naguib Mahfouz when he wrote Children of the Alley*, Salman Rushdie would have realized that he had to stay within bounds.”*

The Attempt on Mahfouz’s Life

The consequences were grim. In 1994 - almost exactly one year after receiving the Nobel Prize from the Swedish Academy - Mahfouz was attacked by two assailants outside his home in Cairo. He was stabbed in the neck and narrowly escaped death. Although he survived, the injuries and subsequent complications prevented him from writing and living normally for the rest of his life. He died in 2006.

Four months after his death, Children of Gebelawi was finally published in Egypt. It immediately became a bestseller.

My Rating: 8,5/10

#Project195 - NORTH KOREA

Bookeria — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:54:23 GMT

Literature and politics have been intertwined for as long as humans have been able to record ideas through systems of signs. Almost from the moment writing came into existence, it has served either to consolidate power or to challenge it. Today, I want to focus on the latter.

It is neither new nor surprising that many writers entered history primarily through their criticism of unjust regimes. Some - like Dante Alighieri or Thomas Mann - paid a comparatively “light” price: exile and the destruction of their reputation at home. Others spent years in hiding, only to face prison sentences or labor camps when their work finally surfaced. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the clearest examples. There were also those who, after publishing their books, became targets of assassination attempts. I wrote about this in the Egypt chapter of Project195 in the context of Salman Rushdie and Naguib Mahfouz. Some paid the highest price of all: their lives - Georgi Markov or Anna Politkovskaya, to name just two.

It is reasonable to assume that this ultimate price may also threaten a mysterious writer (or writer) from North Korea, publishing under the pseudonym Bandi - which in Korean means “Firefly.”

Project195 and North Korea

As part of Project195, I read one book from every country in the world. Under my social media posts, many people challenged me almost provocatively:

“Do North Korea.”
“Good luck finding anything from North Korea.”
“North Korea will be a problem.”

And they were right.

North Korea remains one of the most isolated countries on Earth. Its borders are tightly sealed. Information released to the outside world is carefully curated. Propaganda images of daily life are theatrically staged for the few tourists allowed in under strictly controlled conditions. What life looks like there today - and what it has looked like since the division of Korea in 1948 - remains largely unknown.

Reports from NGOs and intelligence agencies offer fragments, but never the full picture. The most valuable insights come from defectors who managed to escape to China or South Korea and tell their stories. Yet even these accounts, powerful and deeply moving as they are, leave many gaps. The Kim dynasty has spent decades constructing a system in which every citizen knows only what their assigned role requires. Domestic newspapers and television deliver exclusively censored, propagandistic content. Internal travel is strictly monitored or effectively impossible. Social mobility - in education, career, or geography - is minimal.

A factory worker in the provinces cannot describe the lives of the party elite in Pyongyang. A high-ranking official may have no real understanding of the daily struggles of farmers in villages effectively abandoned by the state.

And yet, in this darkness, a faint light appeared.

The Firefly

Like a firefly emerging from a black forest, someone cast a fragile beam of light onto places, events, and people the rest of the world cannot see. That someone is Bandi.

After the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994, North Korea entered a prolonged economic collapse. People starved. Others fled across the border. Bandi lost many of his loved ones. At that point, he made a decision: to secretly write about life inside the dictatorship and, with the help of a trusted friend, smuggle his work beyond the invisible wall.

We know remarkably little about him. We do not know whether Bandi is a man or a woman. We do not know if he is still alive. Even the limited biographical details that reached the outside world were deliberately anonymized to protect him from prison camps - or, more likely, execution.

What we do know is this: Bandi was born in 1950 in China to a Korean family that had fled the war. He grew up in China but later returned to North Korea, where he became a writer working for party-controlled publications and a member of the Korean Writers’ Union - an organization as tightly monitored by the regime as any other institution in the country.

Smuggling the Manuscript

The famine and repression of the mid-1990s led Bandi to entrust his illegal writings - describing the true reality of life in his once-beloved homeland - to a female friend. She decided to defect and, crucially, trusted Bandi enough to tell him of her plans.

Passing the manuscripts directly was too dangerous. After crossing the border, the woman was arrested by Chinese soldiers. Only a substantial bribe saved her from being sent back to North Korea. Once in South Korea, and with the help of human-rights activist Do Hee-yun, it became possible to persuade a Chinese acquaintance to smuggle Bandi’s texts into China during a visit to relatives in North Korea.

According to that intermediary’s account, the moment Bandi handed over his 750-page manuscript to a complete stranger was an act of unimaginable courage. Without exaggeration, he placed his life in the hands of someone he had never met before.

It worked.

The text reached South Korea, where it was analyzed, edited, and eventually published in two books.

The Accusation

The Red Years (2018) is a collection of political poems.
The Accusation (2014) is a collection of seven extraordinary short stories - and it is this book, in English translation, that finally reached me.

The Accusation is exactly what its title promises: an indictment of a criminal regime that has, for over seventy years, subordinated the bodies and minds of an entire nation. A system that reduces ordinary people - people like us - to insignificant numbers in party statistics. It strips them of humanity and emotional life. It steals childhood from children, children from parents, love from spouses, trust from friends.

Through seven stories drawn from everyday life, Bandi portrays people who refuse to surrender their humanity. They do not give up their dignity, their reason, or their capacity to feel. Even when the system pushes them to the limits of mental and physical endurance, they remain human. They react like us. They feel like us. They love and long like us.

In a country we usually encounter through memes and propaganda clips - where food is a luxury, safety is a fiction, and fear is routine - people still live. That is what Bandi writes about.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of his prose is this: although he is often compared to Kafka or Orwell, Bandi does not need to invent fiction. With brutal realism, he describes ordinary situations and ordinary people. He does not create heroes or exaggerate courage. He draws a portrait of a real, cruel system that continues to function quietly, beyond the gaze of the rest of the world.

Should You Read Bandi?

Only if you want to understand what it means to be human.

My rating: 9/10

#Project195 - COLOMBIA

Bookeria — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:28:24 GMT

As part of Project195, I read one book from every country in the world. When my finger - after a brief flight over a miniature globe bought for a few złoty at a local Pepco - finally landed on its surface, it stopped on Colombia.

Naturally, Colombia’s most obvious literary choice would be Gabriel García Márquez, a national treasure and a global icon. But when I began this project, I promised myself that I would prioritize new discoveries. I already knew Márquez’s bibliography almost in full and had covered his novels and reportage multiple times across my social media channels.

I could, of course, have chosen Álvaro Mutis, Jorge Isaacs, José Eustasio Rivera, or Juan Gabriel Vásquez - names readily suggested by search engines and increasingly sophisticated language models. Instead, I decided to step slightly outside my usual pattern and pick a book that was less canonical, but potentially more approachable to read in the original Spanish.

That is how I arrived at La perra (The Bitch, 2017) by Colombian writer Pilar Quintana.

Why La perra?

The choice was not obvious. Quintana is a well-recognized Colombian author, translated into several languages, yet she stands apart from many Colombian classics steeped in Latin American magical realism.

More importantly for me, I learned that her language is simpler, her style more restrained, and the book itself relatively short. These were decisive factors, because I set myself a second challenge alongside this reading: I wanted to read the novel entirely in Spanish, using it as a way to actively practice the language.

I am not writing this to showcase my linguistic skills (perhaps just a little), but primarily to highlight how reading a novel in its original language fundamentally changed my perception of literature - and opened several new doors.

I had read books in English before, and even one or two in Spanish. But I always treated that experience either as an obstacle to overcome in order to reach the content, or as a language-learning exercise focused on vocabulary and comprehension. Rarely was it pure pleasure.

La perra was different.

Reading Without the Translator’s Filter

From the very beginning, I felt confident in my ability to understand the Spanish text. That freed me to focus exclusively on the reading experience itself - on enjoyment, rhythm, tone, and proximity to the source. For years, I had grown so accustomed to reading in Polish that I never truly considered how translation itself shapes our experience of a book.

As I immersed myself in Quintana’s short novel, an initial wave of anxiety set in. Had I overestimated my skills? Would I need to translate every other word? Would I lose more than I gained? The fear faded quickly. Words began to fall into place. Unknown expressions found temporary mental shelves, waiting for meaning to emerge through context or memory. After a few pages - perhaps a dozen - I was no longer decoding. I was reading.

A Quiet Novel That Turns Dark

La perra is an intense novel. Short enough to be called a novella, it initially appears calm, even subdued. With each page, however, it gathers momentum and psychological depth.

We follow Damaris, a middle-aged woman who adopts a puppy in an attempt to fill the aching void left by her unfulfilled desire for motherhood. Over time, the seemingly innocent bond between woman and dog grows heavier, darker. What begins as care slowly turns into obsession - an obsession that can only end in tragedy.

To say more would ruin the effect Quintana carefully builds.

What matters is that she succeeds in crafting a narrative that is both intimate and devastating, without excess or spectacle.

Pilar Quintana Beyond Magical Realism

Quintana is an increasingly important voice not only in Colombian literature, but also beyond Spanish-speaking markets. In 2021, she won the prestigious Premio Alfaguara for her novel Los abismos.

Her writing blends everyday life on the margins with the raw force of nature - both internal and external. In La perra, nature is not merely represented by the animal itself. The dense forest, the powerful ocean waves, the oppressive Colombian heat—these elements are not background scenery. They are integral to the story, shaping the characters and resonating directly with the reader.

What sets Quintana apart most clearly is her deliberate move away from magical realism. Instead of spirits, myths, and fantastical imagery, she offers brutal realism - physical, psychological, and emotional. La perra is a stark exploration of womanhood, motherhood, loneliness, frustration, and desire. The dog becomes a mirror for Damaris: an embodiment of her fears, longings, and suppressed impulses. Their relationship forms the novel’s emotional core and defines its unsettling power.

The Double Reward of Reading in the Original

I return, finally, to where I began.

Quintana’s simple, restrained, and unsentimental prose allowed me to benefit twice. First, it made reading in the original language genuinely possible - and enjoyable. Second, it delivered exactly what I value most as a reader: mounting tension and emotional weight, achieved not through ornamentation, but through precision and honesty.

More importantly, this experience taught me something I felt already while still reading: a novel read in its original language is, by nature, more honest. It brings us closer to the author’s intentions and emotions. It removes - however talented - the intermediary of the translator, who inevitably interprets. Language itself, when changed, imposes its own limitations and distances us further from the source.

La perra inspired me to reach for originals more often. Sometimes that choice is more expensive, requiring international orders. Sometimes it demands patience. But now I know it is always more rewarding.

Bookeria

#Project195 - ARGENTINA

A Bookshop in Valencia

The Life of Julio Cortázar

Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, photographed at the UNESCO gardens in Paris.

Sara Facio - Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, by Alicia D’Amico, Sara Facio & Julio Cortázar - Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires (1968)

Avoiding the Obvious Choice

Four Different Ways of Looking at Reality

1. Manual de Instrucciones

2. Ocupaciones raras

3. Material plástico

4. Historias de cronopios y de famas

A Gateway into Literary Experimentation

Cortázar and the Latin American Boom

Why the Book Didn’t Fully Work for Me

My rating - 4/10

Further Reading

#Project195 - BULGARIA

The Self-Help Trend I Didn’t Trust

A Diary Without a Single Missing Day

A Recommendation That Carried Real Weight

Georgi Gospodinov and Bulgaria’s Literary Voice

Delaying the Inevitable

What the Book Revealed to Me

My rating - 8.5

Further Reading

#Project195 - BELARUS

A Perfect Discovery

A Writer Who Knew War Firsthand

The Invisible People of History

So Why Call It Horror?

My rating - 9/10

#Project195 - URUGUAY

Eduardo Galeano in 2012

Eduardo Galeano and the Memory of a Continent

Why I Thought I Had Chosen the Wrong Book

The Walls Speak

The Wisdom of the Streets

My rating - 7/10

Further Reading

#Project195 - RUSSIA

Portrait by Wasilij Pierow, 1872

Where Does Dostoevsky Rank?

The Missing 180 Countries

The Guardian’s List

Beyond the Old World

Our Shared Blind Spot

My rating - 8/10

Further reading:

#Project195 - MALAYSIA

Colonial Malaysia Through Fiction

Somerset Mougham by Carl Van Vechten (1934)

The Real Ethel Proudlock

A Suspicious Visit

Contradictions in Her Story

A Battle Over Her State of Mind

A Threat to the Colonial Order

Why the Case Matters

My Rating - 8/10

Further Reading

#Project195 - ALGERIA

A voice against the current

The novel: Houris

Questions without answers

A banned book

The accusation

What remains uncertain

My rating - 7 / 10

Further reading

#Project195 - OMAN

A novel about change

A story without a plot

A country in transition

The legacy of slavery

A long and difficult history

The present

Why this book matters

My rating - 7/10

Further reading

#Project195 - SAINT LUCIA