- Open Letter Books
- Three Percent Problem
- Translated Book Award
- Translation Studies
- Translation Database
Tweet
The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Nobel Prize winner J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Desert, translated from the French by C. Dickson and published by David R. Godine as part of the amazing Verba Mundi series.
Timothy Nassau, an intern here last summer and current student at Brown, wrote this review. Tim’s a really sharp reader, and has reviewed and written for us in the past.
Desert made the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist, and we will be featuring this next week in our one-a-day series. Tim seems to have some mixed feelings about this novel, but he does make it sound really interesting:
The lack of any article in the title should immediately tip off the reader: Desert is not about a particular desert, such as the Sahara, or even the desert, that great thirsty body that covers the world in sandy blotches and makes travelers conflate Perrier with Dom Pérignon. Both are certainly integral to the novel, but the desert here is more than a geographical place, more than some combination of climatic conditions and topographical features. For Le Clézio, it is spiritual, the embodiment of a way of life and a means of interacting with the world that comes from the meeting place of a harsh landscape and a resilient human will. The analogy may be silly, but I am reminded of a post-colonial version of the Force from Star Wars—Desert as intangible power that liberates man from the constraints of time, space, and, more specifically, from the destructive powers that the French unleashed in Africa early last century, a destruction that the author traces through its modern iterations.
Desert chronicles the story of a young man and woman, separated by time and space, but unified by a common ancestry and the ubiquitous Desert they inhabit. The two plots are told intermittently throughout the book, but we begin with Nour, a young member of desert warriors known as “the blue men.” Forced to migrate by the steady encroachment of the “Christians,” Nour and his tribe, along with dozens more, move northward through the desert in a brutal and futile search for new lands. Decades later, in an unspecified part of Morocco, Lalla, a late descendant of the blue men, makes a similar journey. Less historical and thus more personal, in these sections we follow Lalla’s life in a shantytown called the Project. To avoid an arranged marriage, she becomes an immigrant in Marseilles where work and happiness are often hard to come by. So as Nour flees from the French, Lalla runs to them, yet both refuse to be conquered by circumstance: Nour joins the hopeless final stand of his people, while Lalla finally finds success as a model.
Click here to read the full review.
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are. . .
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
