Book Reviews
Nicolas Bouvier’s “The Way of the World”
Two Swiss men are at the Iranian border. The year is 1953, just a few months prior to the CIA-sponsored coup. The night is dark. A customs officer emerges from his pavilion and shines his ...
Orhan Pamuk’s “Museum of Innocence”
Orhan Pamuk’s mesmerizing meditation on love and loss in a bygone Istanbul opens with a quotation from Coleridge’s notebooks: “If a man could pass thro’ Paradise in a ...
Ninni Holmqvist’s “The Unit”
Only a Scandinavian dystopia would unravel in a setting “furnished in a modern style and tastefully decorated in muted colors” such as “eggshell white.” And only a ...
Dino Buzzati’s “Poem Strip”
“To me, painting is not a hobby, but a job—writing is my hobby. But painting and writing are ultimately the same thing for me. Whether I write or paint, I pursue the same ...
Mario Bellatin’s “Beauty Salon”
Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, translated elegantly from the Spanish by Kurt Hollander, is a strange and beautiful parable about human bodies living and dying on the fringes of society. ...
Grigoris Balakian’s “Armenian Golgotha”
On April 24, 1915, some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were arrested in Constantinople. Grigoris Balakian, a Christian vartabed, or priest, was among them. "It was as if ...
Max Aub’s “Field of Honour”
In The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel of shadowy plots and anarchist intrigue, the characters wade through a watery murk that befits their scheming and double-dealing. One enters ...
Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s “Summer of the Ubume”
There is a Japanese folktale about a village that was once plagued by a demon. Each night the villagers hear its cries emanating from deep within the surrounding woods and shut themselves in ...
Jean Philippe Toussaint’s “Running Away”
Many of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novels share a certain structure: a nameless narrator drifts through minimalist plots that are almost completely lacking in drama but pervaded by a sense ...
Andrzej Stasiuk’s “Fado”
"Everything happens at the same time. In the shadow of the nuclear power station at Cernovoda on the Danube, you can hear the rumble of carts drawn by donkeys, while herds of cattle wander across..."
Breyten Breytenbach’s “Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish”
"Wait a little so that wind/not bewilder me"; this slim collection of verses sketches out the spiritual geography of a friendship between the author, the South African painter and ...
Yu Hua’s “Brothers”
It is a shame that Groucho Marx is not available to appear on film in the role of Baldy Li, the ridiculous, hedonistic, almost vaudevillian main character of Brothers, Yu Hua's epic comic ...
“Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch”
If Israel had a Mount Rushmore-type memorial for poets, the late Dahlia Ravikovitch would be part of the monument. Although little known to American readers, she is admired in Israel as much, if ...
Guillermo Rosales’s “Halfway House”
The Halfway House is one of only two novels Guillermo Rosales—the respected though to date largely unknown Cuban writer—did not destroy before committing suicide in 1993. It is a ...
Sergio Ramírez’s “A Thousand Deaths Plus One”
Sergio Ramírez's A Thousand Deaths Plus One, translated from Spanish by Leland H. Chambers, interweaves historical fact with outrageous fiction, painstaking truth with barefaced lies. ...
Friedrich Holderlin’s “Selected Poems” and “Odes and Elegies”
Translation, according to John Tipton in the afterword to his English translation of Sophocles's play, Ajax, is a kind of forgery: " . . . akin to building a copy of a house seen across ...
Merce Rodoreda’s “Death in Spring”
For the novel to emerge as a form, it had to lure readers away from the period's main form of prose publication: religious literature. And fiction has been playing with—and ...
Andrey Platonov’s “Foundation Pit”
A nation's literary patrimony is a strange thing. We can never be quite certain of our holdings. Americans, in 1900, did not know they had Melville. From the 1930s till his death prompted a ...
Can Xue’s “Five Spice Street”
Who is Madam X? Madam X sells peanuts at the stand with the red-painted sign. Madam X is an occultist, a collector of mirrors and corrupter of neighborhood children. Madam X is a home wrecker. ...
Franz Kafka’s “Amerika: The Missing Person”
Literary translators strive to make their texts count as literature in the language they are translating into. In English, more often than not, this means producing a text that will not ...
Satoshi Azuchi’s “Supermarket: A Novel”
In 1969, a dapper and promising young man named Kojima leaves his comfortable position at a renowned bank to come work at his cousin's supermarket chain, an adolescent company with good ...
Takashi Hiraide’s “For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut”
"Spirits wrapped in a skin of green. Each one lushly growing, a hanging drop of a thunderstorm!" Takashi Hiraide's collection of prose poetry For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut ...
Dumitru Tsepeneag’s “Pigeon Post”
The term "pigeon post" refers to the use of homing pigeons to deliver messages. Perhaps the best known was the French Pigeon Post of the Franco-Prussian War in the late nineteenth ...
Ingo Schulze’s “New Lives”
In his foreword to New Lives, Schulze writes that he had been casting about for ideas for a new novel and had begun to collect material on a newspaper tycoon, Heinrich Turmer. When he discovers ...
Saša Stanišić‘s “How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone”
"What's going to happen is so improbable that there'll be no improbability left for a made-up story." So thinks Aleksandar Krsmanović on April 6, 1992, the day the war forces ...
Pierre Martory’s “Landscapist”
From swans with amputated purple wings, to a gnome with a hairlip, to a tired unicorn dreaming "of yelling schoolboys, Plato badly digested," Pierre Martory's collection The ...
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