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Gerard Kruisman

    Indian Summer
    The History of Danish Dreams
    Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
    The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
    Monumentale propaganda
    The Exception
    • The Exception

      • 487 pages
      • 18 hours of reading

      Four women work at the Danish Centre for Genocide Studies. When two of them start receiving death threats, they suspect they are being stalked by Mirko Zigic, a Bosnian torturer and war criminal. But perhaps he is not the person behind the threats - it could be someone in their very midst. Much of the drama created revolves not only around the scary sense of a killer prowling in the shadows but also around the manipulative games being played between the women in the office as they come under pressure and turn on each other. The irony is that these betrayals and persecutions are taking place amongst professionals who daily analyse cases of appalling cruelty. Now and again, the narrative is broken with extracts from 'articles' dealing with crimes against humanity and the pyschology of evil. Whilst the women apply this to their work with genocide (and the killer), there are parallels to their own behaviour. It's a fabulous pacy read - a real page-turner that resonates with deeper questions.

      The Exception
      4.3
    • Monumentale propaganda

      • 364 pages
      • 13 hours of reading

      From Vladimir Voinovich, one of the great satirists of contemporary Russian literature, comes a new comic novel about the absurdity of politics and the place of the individual in the sweep of human events. Monumental Propaganda , Voinovich’s first novel in twelve years, centers on Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, a true believer in Stalin, who finds herself bewildered and beleaguered in the relative openness of the Khrushchev era. She believes her greatest achievement was to have browbeaten her community into building an iron statue of the supreme leader, which she moves into her apartment after his death. And despite the ebb and flow of political ideology in her provincial town, she stubbornly, and at all costs, centers her life on her private icon. Voinovich’s humanely comic vision has never been sharper than it is in this hilarious but deeply moving tale–equally all-seeing about Stalinism, the era of Khrushchev, and glasnost in the final years of Soviet rule. The New York Times Book Review called his classic work, The Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin , “a masterpiece of a new form–socialist surrealism . . . the Soviet Catch-22 written by a latter-day Gogol." In Monumental Propaganda we have the welcome return of a truly singular voice in world literature. From the Hardcover edition.

      Monumentale propaganda
      3.5
    • Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant and passes the war peacefully tending the village postmistress's garden.

      The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin
      4.0
    • Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

      • 409 pages
      • 15 hours of reading

      'I think more highly of snow and ice than of love' One snowy day in Copenhagen, six-year-old Isaiah falls to his death from a city rooftop.The police pronounce it an accident. But Isaiah's neighbour, Smilla, suspects murder.She embarks on a dangerous quest to find the truth, following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow.

      Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
      3.8
    • The History of Danish Dreams

      • 403 pages
      • 15 hours of reading

      From the bestselling author of Smilla's Sense of Snow comes his first novel--an inspired and often hilarious Danish family saga suffused with satire and magical realism.

      The History of Danish Dreams
      3.5
    • Indian Summer

      roman

      • 174 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      Tijdens een receptie komt de schrijver August zijn grote jeugdliefde tegen, de fotografe Alma. Dat veroorzaakt een stroom aan herinneringen: zijn stormachtige verliefdheid; zijn wanhoop toen Alma hem verliet voor zijn vriend, de kunstschilder Gustav; zijn tijd met Harriët, die hem uiteindelijk ook verliet. De hartstocht tussen August en Alma bloeit weer op, maar wanneer zij erachter komt dat Gustav op sterven ligt verlaat zij August opnieuw.

      Indian Summer
      3.3