RaveThe Washington PostIt is 450 pages of vivid, fluid, richly detailed drama, tormented and hilarious. Originally published in 2000, two years after his father’s death and more than a decade before the other translated novels, it shows us the crucible in which the author’s later style was formed: Coolness and control are defense mechanisms learned in the long struggle with his father ... The novel gains with length. As drama and detail accumulate, we share the boy’s difficulty in finding a steady position vis-à-vis his father ... Starnone’s prose, ably and fluently translated by Oonagh Stransky, is compelling without being showy. He nails down his father in what could seem a tremendous act of revenge but is also a moving celebration of the man’s achievement and a profound consideration of artistic vocation.
Jhumpa Lahiri
RaveThe London Review of Books (UK)... offers an altogether more interesting solution to the dual nature of [Lahiri\'s] bilingual texts. It’s a novel with radical ambitions: it seeks to be inside and outside two literary traditions, neither here nor there ... Lahiri seems most assured in tight spaces ... The blurring of author and character gives the novel a sense of urgency, particularly because the narrator is hardly in a happy place. The novel sustains a triumphantly controlled melancholy, in which pleasure and stability are achieved through the daily micromanagement of feelings of displacement and inadequacy ... is not without wry humour ... In her translation, Lahiri avoids Goldstein’s quaintness, rearranging the syntax and sometimes adjusting the meaning to make the speaking voice more fluent and convincing. Yet something strange remains, something earned from the text’s passage through Italian. The sentences are shorter than those in Lahiri’s earlier work, everything is more controlled. As my own forty years in Italy have shown me, when one writes in a foreign language, one feels, even becomes, to a degree, someone else. And in translating that someone else, rather than writing spontaneously, there is always, as Leopardi observed, something ‘discordant’, something ‘incompatible’. The reader feels spooked, unsettled ... with this arresting superimposition we arrive at the core of Lahiri’s book – its evocation of a life at once painfully precarious and yet full of small, intensely physical pleasures.
Edoardo Albinati, Trans. by Antony Shugaar
RaveHarpers...Albinati’s book is not so easily pinned down. It’s certainly not another In Cold Blood ... Albinati offers no extended dramatization of the events themselves, or the consequent police investigation, or the judicial proceedings. We do not follow the life of the girl who survived, or that of the culprit who escaped. Indeed, one of the charms and irritations of this extraordinary and extraordinarily long novel (just a few thousand words shy of War and Peace) is how ingeniously it plays with our expectations ... Story after fascinating story culminates in moments of transcendence ... I can think of no author who has prompted in me such frequent shifts from admiration to irritation and back; who has aroused so much pleasure with his stories and reflections, and so much annoyance with his emphatic, exaggerated, paradoxical claims, not to mention the sheer length of this interminable book. Yet it’s hard to feel, as the pages roll by, that this is not absolutely willed on the author’s part. The book itself becomes the reader’s Catholic school, at times a kind of prison where the same concepts are repeated ad infinitum, at times a kind of violence; in any event, not so much a novel about a crime...as the memoir of a man who cannot help but see every human transaction in terms of criminality.
Fernando Aramburu, Trans. by Alfred Macadam
PanNew York Review of BooksIn general, Aramburu’s manipulation of his village folk, his frequent use of such expressions as \'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph\' or \'The guy with the big balls,\' or the many, many words in Basque create a rather old-world, even patronizing tone. Sometimes it seems that, rather than local circumstances, it is the author who is imprisoning the characters, obliging them to behave blindly at first, then with great enlightenment, exactly as suits the book’s development. The impression is not helped by Alfred MacAdam’s translation, which veers wildly between seeking idiomatic intensity in an American vernacular...to a slavish tracking of Spanish syntax ... With page after page of this, all distinction between the way the various characters think and speak is blurred, clunky, and quaint, as if they were migrants who had learned a few English phrases but were otherwise struggling to express themselves ... But while few would hesitate to condemn ETA’s strategy of terror, it is curious that nothing is said about the issue of a community losing control of its \'homeland\' or seeing it subsumed in a larger dominant culture ... Toward the end of Homeland, on the contrary, it simply seems there is no Basque problem at all, and very likely never was. The entire struggle was an ugly error, promoted only by the evil and the ingenuous, aligned with bigotry and superstition ... Perhaps in the original Spanish, for readers who are more aware of the events Aramburu talks about and who experience his style differently, this is not the case.
Giorgio Bassani, Trans. by Jamie McKendrick
PositiveHarpersEach story is self-contained, but with characters and events that return and call to one another, illuminate one another, so that reading the whole oeuvre together we have the powerful impression of having seen three generations consume their lives, or all too frequently be consumed by violence ... [Bassani\'s] fiction is by no means circumscribed by its focus on a particular historical moment. Nor can his vision be so easily aligned with straightforward liberalism as many commentators would have us believe ... Bassani explores the relationship between fear and conformity, individually and collectively, what it means to be civilized, and what role art might have in the matter. For readers today, with our own civilization looking increasingly precarious—and the urge to withdraw from it ever more enticing—the allure of these stories is immediate ... Sitting beside the author watching a fire blaze—destructive, beautiful, and above all compelling—is largely how it feels reading Bassani’s work ... Complicity in denial is the coal that smolders throughout Bassani’s fiction. It is always what is unsaid that most matters ... It’s quite a challenge for the translator, and Jamie McKendrick’s new version often runs into trouble when the prose gets knotty. Negotiating the complex syntax seems to distract his attention from any number of errors ... Of course one wishes to congratulate the publisher for bringing out all Bassani’s fiction in a single volume; these are works that are stronger together, and fortunately they can still be enjoyed in this translation. Nevertheless, it would be good to see it carefully revised before the next edition.
Roberto Saviano, Trans. by Antony Shugaar
PanThe Guardian\"Nothing is allowed to unfold without Saviano’s weighty comment ... One soon gives up trying to remember who is who. Nor does the translation help. Antony Shugaar has done sterling work in the past, but he never finds a credible register for Saviano’s overheated prose, let alone dialogues in Neapolitan dialect ... Perhaps Saviano’s clunky imagery is contagious. In Shugaar’s defence one can only say that almost any translation would have pointed up the uneasily inauthentic voice of this disappointing book.\
Domenico Starnone, Trans. by Jhumpa Lahiri
PositiveThe Guardian\"Bar an occasional stumble, Lahiri leads us through Starnone’s narrative corridors in fluent prose with some resourcefulness. At least in this regard, the reader has nothing to fear. But all the explicit discussion of James and ghosts, of genes and DNA, reflections resumed and repeated in a 20-page appendix that, together with Lahiri’s introduction, pads out this fine novella to novel length, will for many readers seem exactly the kind of energy-sapping intellectualisation that Daniele fears is ruining his drawings.\
Per Petterson, Trans. by Anne Born
RaveThe New York Review of BooksBoth Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia are essentially about betrayals of trust. In both novels a young person on the brink of adulthood loses, in melodramatic circumstances, the one relationship that made it possible to face an inclement world with confidence. Narrated in hindsight by elderly survivors, the novels hint at a crippled adult life only half-lived in constant apprehension and prolonged mourning. A quiet stoicism holds panic and despair at bay … Much of Petterson’s worldwide success with Out Stealing Horses depends on two qualities: a deceptively simple, wonderfully incantatory style in which small units of well-observed detail and action, connected only by a string of ‘and’s, accumulate in long rhythmic sentences that frequently give us the impression that the next detail will be very bad news. We are kept spellbound and anxious … Anne Born has been able to render Petterson’s Norwegian in a syntactically simple, hypnotically fluent English.
Peter Stamm, Trans. by Michael Hoffman
PositiveThe GuardianAs always, Stamm sets up the psychological territory with such quiet precision that the reader succumbs at once: it must be true … Not to spoil it, let’s simply say that, between mountain misadventures, police investigations and strange scramblings of chronology, Stamm finds a way to draw his characters’ sense of being divided between different lives into the very structure of the book, creating two quite separate dimensions for husband and wife, to the point that it is sometimes difficult to understand whether the woman we are reading about, waiting years and years like some latter-day Penelope for her husband’s return, is no more than Thomas’s fantasy … Whatever the case, it’s clear that only Stamm could have dreamed up such a plot, and only he could have pulled it off. It is his genius and his burden.
Gerbrand Bakker, Trans. by David Colmer
RaveThe New York Review of BooksThe charm of Bakker’s book is how finely every element is balanced, how perfectly the story is paced. Helmer is aware that his misdirected life is largely his own fault. He could have disobeyed his father, but ‘always just let things happen.’ His ‘outrageously ugly’ mother, with whom he shared an unspoken complicity against the father, was also ‘outrageously kind-hearted,’ but didn’t speak up for him and, even if she had, he would not have taken advantage of it. This fatal lack of purposefulness is also Helmer’s appeal and gives him a deep affinity with the animals who have made his life a prison … The great pleasure of this novel is how it has just enough plot to allow us to relish its beautifully turned observations of birds and beasts, weather and water. Helmer’s capacity to respond to the natural world and enjoy small practical tasks takes the edge off the story’s sadness, redeeming the life he thinks of as wasted.
Anne Enright
MixedThe New York Review of BooksWhile, in the opening chapters, Veronica informs her siblings of Liam’s death, then travels from Dublin to Brighton to recover her brother’s corpse, she also gives us snippets of information, rapid caricatures, sharp memories of the family home and family habits. This is efficiently done and the evocation of an overcrowded space full of busy life is one of the book’s achievements … When, on the other hand, she slides into melodrama and literary formula, The Gathering does indeed sound like at least nine other writers and by no means the best. As my response to the novel swung back and forth from admiration to irritation, it was hard not to wish that Enright had concentrated on the complex and chaotic Hegartys and given us rather less of the lurid, convenient, and suspiciously topical Lamb Nugent.
Jhumpa Lahiri
MixedThe New York Review of BooksThe sense of effort is everywhere apparent: the effort to write in Italian, which has stripped down Lahiri’s otherwise artfully meandering, bric-a-brac-rich sentences to the bare essentials, and then the perhaps even greater effort to keep us interested and impressed, often by simply insisting on the intensity of her feelings. It is rather as if we were exploring the emotions of a romantic affair, but without the concrete circumstances ... I can think of no other book set in Italy that has less of the color and drama of Italy in it. Not a single figure emerges. Not a dialogue of any note. Not a single situation characteristic of Italy ... her two fine, courageous [short] stories make clear that the problem is not what language to write in, but what to write about.
Han Kang
PanThe New York Review of BooksLooked at closely, the prose is far from an epitome of elegance, the drama itself neither understated nor beguiling, the translation frequently in trouble with register and idiom. Studying the thirty-four endorsements again, and the praise after the book won the prize, it occurs to me there is a shared vision of what critics would like a work of 'global fiction' to be and that The Vegetarian has managed to present itself as a candidate that can be praised in those terms. Ideologically, it champions the individual (woman) against an oppressive society (about which we know nothing, except that it seems 'worse' than our own). Emotionally, it allows us to feel intense sympathy for a helpless victim, which is always encouraging for our self-esteem. Aesthetically, it offers moments of surrealism—typically in the wife’s heated and unhappy imaginings, or the brother-in-law’s fantasies of vegetable couplings—which we can see as excitingly exotic and a guarantee of a lively imagination. In this regard, the slightly disorienting effect of the translation can actually reinforce our belief that we are coming up against something new and different.
Sven Birkets
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewAlthough I too have committed much of my life to literature, this does seem a rather reductive vision of human destiny. More pertinently, I doubt it will reduce Internet use by a single click.
