John Taylor

Fuse Book Review: Poetry in the Rough — Jean-Paul Clébert’s Graphic Evocations of a Clandestine Paris

April 1, 2016
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An extraordinary book that should be in the hands of every lover of the French capital. And don’t we all love Paris?

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Book Review: Is It Possible to Hate Music? And Why?

March 25, 2016
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This invigorating book formulates a caveat: beware of music..

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Book Review: “Les Diaboliques” — An Essential Hidden Dimension in French Literature

January 31, 2016
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In “Les Diaboliques” readers must expect quite a lot of crime and some misogyny as well.

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Poetry Review: “Zone: Selected Poems” — Reproducing the Music of Guillaume Apollinaire

January 27, 2016
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Whenever there is a choice to be made between meaning and melody, the translator tends to opt for the latter.

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Book Review: Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ Memoir of Surviving the Nazi Death Camps

December 23, 2015
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In contrast to similar extermination-camp memoirs, But You Did Not Come Back focuses on the affliction of women.

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Book Review: The Blissful “Botched-Night Splendor” of Tram 83

October 2, 2015
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Tram 83 mirrors the most sordid and chaotic features of contemporary African cities, in which non-Africans also remain intimately and often deviously involved.

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Book Review: Dystopia as Our Future — Antoine Volodine’s “Post-Exotic” Oeuvre

September 8, 2015
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Antoine Volodine is a master of the prolonged, very prolonged, tongue-in-cheek spoof. But he is also dead serious.

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Book Review: Blaise Cendrars’ Brilliant WW I Memoir — Surviving the “Shambles” of War

August 28, 2015
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The Bloody Hand stands alongside other autobiographical classics devoted to the First World War.

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Book Review: Anne Garréta’s “Sphinx” — A Compelling Story of Genderless Love

July 15, 2015
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Garréta pulls off a stylistic feat: it is impossible to determine the gender of the two main characters.

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Poetry Review: Restoring the “Old Questions” — Klaus Merz’s “Out of the Dust”

June 16, 2015
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Poet Klaus Merz wields his deceptively simple diction in order to pry open hidden secrets: what we leave unsaid, what we neglect, avoid.

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