Quarterly Conversation #11

The new issue of Quarterly Conversation is now available, and full of interesting pieces including reviews of Lydie Salvayre’s The Power of Flies, Dorothea Dieckmann’s Guantanamo (which won our inaugural Best Translation of 2007 award), and Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s Wolves of the Crescent Moon. There’s also a longer essay by François Monti on the fascinating and strange fiction of Eric Chevillard.

A really cool feature is the Overrated/Underrated list in which each of the issue’s contributors selects one overrated and one underrated book. Interesting in and of itself, but really, I only got as far as this entry, which made me giddy with anticipation:

Underrated: Doctor Pasavento by Enrique Vila-Matas

Maybe it’s problematic to consider an award-winning book under-rated, but quite a few reviewers of Enrique Vila-Matas’s Doctor Pasavento complained that it was just the same book as the previous one, and the one before. Surface-reading at its worst: if Doctor Pasavento, the third volume of Vila-Matas’s metaliterary trilogy, indeed reiterates things that were said in Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady, it does so with much more depth, addressing a very different theme: the difficulty of being nobody. It is the pinnacle of Vila-Matas’s body of work thus far, and it should appeal to readers of Sebald and Walser.

I really hope New Directions publishes this sometime soon . . .