Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie

An extraordinary novel… one of the most important to come out of he English-speaking in this generation. (Robert Towers in The New York Review of Books)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

A good book, definitely; it seems to try and find a place for man in society, regardless of whether magical or not, or whether you ‘believe or not.’ Its dilemmas. focused on children born in one hour in one country, and exaggerations of the universal. Comparisons with The Tin Drum are too obvious: the style is perhaps too similar, and is in a way a dissatisfying element. But perhaps it’s the first person's inability to even find a style for himself - always someone else’s. Perhaps he is truly mediocre.

Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann

A remarkable achievement… In Mr. Woods's sparkling new translation, the reader now encounters a work that is closer in style, vocabulary, idiom and tone to the original. (The New York Times Book Review)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

A youthful masterpiece. Definitely a masterpiece; but I feel it has a youthful, undeveloped feel, too. Sesame, for instance, who only ever says, ‘You good child’ - leitmotif or 2D? But the fact that there is no single, monumental event that contributes to the decline of the family, but rather a myriad of failures, individualities and self-perceptions, all of which contribute to the somehow inevitable decline of the family, makes the story and its family engagingly 3D.

The History of Danish Dreams, by Peter Høeg

This witty family saga replete with love and folly is proof enough that this young Dane belongs to a great family of Scandinavian narrators. In exploring the past of a country whose ideas have sometimes veered towards the nightmarish, he reminds us that dreams my also stir the conscience. (Télérama)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

Beautiful, elegant, thoughtful - even if there is a loss of momentum in the last pages. A fine example of attempting to understand history and oneself by writing (examining) it, no matter - in a sense - what you write.