What I read in April + sun

Last year I discovered Proust. It's really one of those things: everyone tells you you have to read Proust, but you don't, until one day you do and when you do you ask "why did no one ever tell me?". This month I finished In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated into English by James Grieve. It reminded me of my own early teen summers, which were obviously nothing like that but that's Proust, baby. I also read two of Alan Pauls' three "novelas de época", in their and my native Spanish: Historia del llanto and Historia del pelo. The former ominous and endearing, the latter funny and, I found, particularly Argentinian; both written in the style of spiral sentences Spanish lends itself for so well. I'll tackle the last of the three novels, Historia del dinero, when I'm back from Uruguay. Lastly, today I finished Koljós (Kolkhoze, in the original French edition), by Emmanuel Carrère. I liked it because I would be hard pressed not to like any book containing both of my two…