Olivier Rolin - Böcker

Their generation was anything but lost, at least in the beginning. Filled with fiery ambition and idealistic to a fault, they found their voice in the Paris of 1968 and were intent on exposing the powers of repression and the demons of Western capitalism (and what, really, was the difference?)—by any means. But the acts of violence misfired, the principles of Marxism and Maoism became emptied of meaning, and the casualties mounted. The protagonist Martin is now middle-aged; his group, "The Cause," is disbanded; his best friend has committed suicide; and he finds he must try to explain to the man's daughter who they were, what they thought they were doing, and what happened. Paper Tiger takes place during one night that this unlikely couple spends driving around Paris as they revisit a somewhat distant past. This odyssey is adroitly evoked by Rolin's long, fluid sentences as they reflect the car's route past the sundry signs of the past and advertisements of the present dotting the Paris beltway. This prize-winning novel by one of France's most acclaimed writers tells, through Martin, the elegiac story of a whole generation's coming of age.

At some Parisian lost-and-found, a mysterious manuscript scribbled onto stray bits of hotel stationary and postcards and stuffed into an abandoned briefcase comes into the hands of an “editor,” who claims to faithfully transcribe and assemble the random texts. On the face of it, these consist of fastidious descriptions of a series of hotel rooms in cities around the globe, but their world-weary writer, a certain “Olivier Rolin,” is also involved in a number of highly improbable international networks, populated by unsavory thugs and Mata Haris in distress.Author Olivier Rolin has dipped into his extensive travel notebooks to create this highly inventive novel that spoofs, among others, the decaying international espionage scene, the literary author publicity tour, and official French culture, all against a backdrop of the queasy alienation secreted by standard-issue hotel rooms across the globe.

Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2018The beautifully illustrated, heartbreaking story of an innocent man in a Soviet gulag, told for the first time in English.One fateful day in 1934, a husband arranged to meet his wife under the colonnade of the Bolshoi theatre. As she waited for him in vain, he was only a few hundred metres away, in a cell in the notorious Lubyanka prison. Less than a year before, Alexey Wangenheim – a celebrated meteorologist – had been hailed by Stalin as a national hero. But following his sudden arrest, he was exiled to a gulag, forced to spend his remaining years on an island in the frozen north, along with thousands of other political prisoners.Stalin’s Meteorologist is the thrilling and deeply moving account of an innocent man caught up in the brutality of Soviet paranoia. It's a timely reminder of the human consequences of political extremism.