hmm...hab seit langer zeit nun wieder paar bücher durchgenommen und von 2 bin ich total begeistert

ich zitiere aus amazon.com
Life of Pi

Some books defy categorisation: Life of Pi, the second novel from Canadian writer Yann Martel, is a case in point: just about the only thing you can say for certain about it is that it is fiercely and admirably unique. The plot, if that’s the right word, concerns the oceanic wanderings of a lost boy, the young and eager Piscine Patel of the title (Pi). After a colourful and loving upbringing in gorgeously-hued India, the Muslim-Christian-animistic Pi sets off for a fresh start in Canada. His blissful voyage is rudely interrupted when his boat is scuppered halfway across the Pacific, and he is forced to rough it in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a whingeing zebra and a 450 pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker. That would be bad enough, but from here on things get weirder: the animals start slaughtering each other in a veritable frenzy of allegorical bloodlust, until Richard the tiger and Pi are left alone to wander the wastes of ocean, with plenty of time to ponder their fate, the cruelty of the gods, the best way to handle storms and the various different recipes for oothappam, scrapple and coconut yam kootu. The denouement is pleasantly neat.


Wahnsinnig gutes Buch imo, viele interessante Metaphern.
Das Buch ist eigentlich in 3 große Kapitel aufgeteilt, die Jugend (viel über Religion, sehr genial gemacht), am Meer im Lifeboat mit dem Tiger und dann ein Interview mit japanischen Seebeamten. Geniales, überraschendes Ende.
Werde ich in ein paar Wochen erneut lesen, weil es mir so gefallen hat; man findet ja auch Anspielungen in vorderen Kapitel...


Everything is Illuminated

The simplest thing would be to describe Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish-American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex) and a flatulent mongrel bitch, named Sammy Davis JR JR. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains and Latka from the US television series Taxi. (Sentences such as "It is mammoth honour for me write for a writer, especially when he is American writer, like Ernest Hemingway"; "It is bad and popular habit for people in Ukraine to take things without asking" are the norm.) Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by "Safran Foer"--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the Shetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.

guter humor, der auf Sprachbarrieren Englisch-Russisch basiert, die trockene und direkte Art des jungen Ukrainers (..."I have a big cock." "OK."), Abwechslungsreiche Kapitel (Narrator, Briefwechsel mit Kommentaren und die Geschichte eines Yiddishen Dorfes geschrieben mit entsprechender yiddishen Wortwahl 150 Jahre zuvor.