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We’re publishing Mathias Énard’s Zone next year, and I couldn’t be more excited. There’s a review of it up now at The Quarterly Conversation, and while it’s not a wholly positive review, the review just makes me happier to be publishing it. Zone is definitely an Open Letter book:
Zone doesn’t seduce so much as it makes its reader uncomfortable and sets her mind to work. In Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker wrote an alternative history of World War II that led the reader to disturbing what-ifs. Énard too writes an alternative history of his zone: through the mind of Francis Servain, he makes us see what we tend to forget and, sometimes, what lies ahead. Zone is history of literature as well as history of the Mediterranean, although there is no lesson or philosophy behind all this. It’s an admission of human failure. In spite of the book’s many weaknesses it is a powerful read, a novel for the ages, because what is inside will probably never be out of date and will always somewhat enlighten the reader’s view of the times she lives in. (It remains to be seen whether it will work on an American reader, one likely much less familiar with most of what happens in the Mediterranean zone.) Francis is sure his journey is toward the end of the world, and Zone is an end of the world novel that knows precisely that this is actually not the end of the world. This might very well be the crudest joke, the most gruesome story narrated here by Mathias Énard: it is not over.
Reviewed by Pierce Alquist
A Greater Music is the first in a line of steady and much-anticipated releases by Bae Suah from key indie presses (this one published by Open Letter). Building off of the interest of 2016 Best Translated Book Award longlist nominee. . .
Reviewed by Tim Lebeau
The dislocation of individuals from the countries of their birth has long been a common theme in contemporary literature. These two short novels recently translated into English appear firmly rooted in this tradition of ex-pat literature, but their authors eschew. . .
Reviewed by Jason Newport
In Melancholy, Hungarian author, critic, and art theorist László Földényi presents a panorama of more than two thousand years of Western historical and cultural perspectives on the human condition known as melancholia. In nine chapters, Földényi contrasts the hero worship. . .
Reviewed by Jeanne Bonner
Pascal Quignard’s __The Hatred of Music_ is the densest, most arcane, most complex book I’ve read in ages. It’s also a book that covers a topic so basic, so universal—almost primordial—that just about any reader will be perversely thrilled by. . .
Reviewed by Damian Kelleher
In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Flaubert attempted to highlight the ordinary, tired, and often crass nature of common expressions by italicising them within the text. When Charles, Emma Bovary’s mediocre husband, expresses himself in a manner akin to that of. . .
Reviewed by Russell Guilbault
Eliot Weinberger takes big strides across literary history in his genuinely breathtaking short work, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, tracking translations of a short ancient Chinese poem from the publication of Ezra Pound’s Cathay in 1915 to Gary. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
Prose translators will likely disagree, but I believe translating poetry requires a significant level of talent, a commitment to the text, and near mania, all of which suggests that the undertaking is the greatest possible challenge. The task is to. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The biggest issues with books like The Subsidiary often have to do with their underpinnings—when we learn that Georges Perec wrote La Disparition without once using the letter E, we are impressed. Imagine such a task! It takes a high. . .
Reviewed by Kristel Thornell
Following The Infatuations, Javier Marías’s latest novel seems, like those that have preceded it, an experiment to test fiction’s capacity to mesmerize with sombre-sexy atmospheres and ruminative elongated sentences stretched across windowless walls of paragraphs. Thus Bad Begins offers his. . .
Reviewed by Will Eells
Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe’s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The Changeling, as well as many other works not yet released in English, Death by Water is narrated in. . .
- 5 October 17: 40th ALTA conference | Minneapolis, MN
