PositiveTupelo QuarterlyA host of minor characters lends a sense of completeness to the fictional world ... The \'multigenerational family epic\' often fails to evoke the breadth of changes affecting more than one society, because the perspectives of its narrative aren’t different enough from each other. The technology of such novels often interposes a false distance between authorial voice and subject matter, a distance that’s actually a proximity, which the author attempts to make up for with various forms of irony ... The unadorned suppleness of Naffis-Sahely’s prose prompts the surmise that Spina’s lack of emphasis sets him apart from all but a very few other novelists writing in Italian. The next two installments are eagerly awaited.
Ramon Saizarbitoria, Trans. by Aritz Branton
RaveWorld Literature TodayInvoking a mystique of the real in the tradition of Another Country, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Ulysses, Ramon Saizarbitoria has written a contemporary novel of ideas depicting everyday life in the Basque Country ...a constellation of relationships takes shape among a cluster of persons residing in the Martutene district of Do-nostia (San Sebastián)...couples at the center of the book personify contrasting sides of human nature — Martin and Julia represent the artistic, Abaitua and Pilar the scientific — at the confluence of multiple currents of Basque life: culture, love, politics, law, religion, government, medicine, business, economics, history, geography, and language meet in the two relationships as they change over Martutene’s eight hundred pages ... The people of Martutene become as real to us as their stories are to them ...translator Aritz Branton performs a valuable service by providing broader access to an essential work of Basque literature.
