A Palace in the Old Village

Tahar Ben Jelloun explores the immigrant experience in this novel of dislocation and longing. The Mohammed of the story, a largely unassimilated Moroccan living in France, retires from an auto factory and dreams of building a palace back home where he will be surrounded by his children and grandchildren. But the world cannot cooperate with the simple, decent demands of a man now lost both abroad and at home. Based on this book, Ben Jelloun appears to be a cold and pessimistic sort on the subject of reconciling Muslim and Western societies. His accounting of Mohammed's genuine devotion to his faith nonetheless serves to humanize a people often seen as stock characters.

The Assignment

Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Assignment contains 24 chapters -- and 24 sentences. At 129 pages, that amounts to about five pages per sentence. It is a credit to Durrenmatt that this technique rarely feels forced or awkward. The story itself is a metaphysical exercise on the meaning of observation, existence, God, identity, and much more -- in short, a mind-bending or possibly mind-blowing journey.

Comedy in a Minor Key

This short novel by Hans Keilson tells the story of a Dutch couple who hide a Jew in their home during the war. Saved from the Germans, Nico, a perfume salesman, dies of ordinary pneumonia. "He had defended himself against death from without, and then it had carried him off from within." Keilson's spare, elegant prose puts a reader in mind of Par Lagerqvist.

The Pledge

"Our rational mind casts only a feeble light on the world." This statement comes near the end of Friedrich Durrenmatt's engrossing and polished novel. It is a detective story in form; a philosophical exercise in substance. A police inspector's theory about a girl's murder may well be correct, but events will not bend to fit his desired conclusion. His resulting descent into the void is a chilling object lesson.

Room

This novel by Emma Donoghue falls into a category I wouldn't have previously thought existed: tedious page-turners. It is also staggeringly unambitious. Anyone who has endured relentless questioning from a five-year-old about everything in the world can multiply that experience by 321 pages to get an idea of Room's effect. The book is structurally elegant, following a boy who has lived his whole life with his mother in an 11-by-11 storage shed as they escape and confront the world. But it could, and should, have been done in 40 pages.

Conrad and the Web

A Bookman's Daybook by Burton Rascoe includes a noteworthy item on Joseph Conrad. Rascoe wondered how someone who lived in an "inland hamlet" seemed to know everything that was going on -- unlike most novelists, he said, "who are concerned only with themselves." The answer was that Conrad used a clipping service to send him news that might reasonably interest him. This saved him the time of plowing through all the papers himself. Convenient, yes, and also preceding by about 90 years the "invention" of the RSS feed.

Scott-King's Modern Europe

When Mr. Scott-King, a middle-aged schoolmaster in the classics, hears that parents "want to prepare their boys for jobs in the modern world" and that "you can hardly blame them, can you?" he replies: "Oh yes. I can and do." In Evelyn Waugh's 88-page story, Scott-King travels to the fictional nation of Neutralia to deliver a speech on a late Renaissance poet. His travails in this ex-Hapsburg state that evinces all the grubbiest aspects of modernity are told with Waugh's typical dry wit and elegant style. Returning to this author will never disappoint.