Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Goncalo Tavares [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next featured selection is Goncalo Tavare’s Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, and available from Dalkey Archive Press at the end of the month.

E.J. wrote about Tavares a couple years back when he won the Portugal Telecom Prize for Jerusalem. He included this bit about the “Neighborhood” books, which really should be available to English readers:

We found out about Tavares at Frankfurt and got our hands on a few of his “Neighborhood” books—some of which have been translated into English by TransBooks in India (What kind of audience is there is in India for Portuguese translations . . . into English?). Each book in the series is a small collection of short stories inspired by literary and artistic figures. The ones we have in English are Mister Brecht, Mister Valéry, Mister Henri, and Mister Juarroz. It appears that the neighborhood—represented in an illustration on the back of the books by a sketch of a set of buildings with arrows telling you which building, and which window, each person lives in—is ever expanding, but so far includes, among others, Calvino, Kafka, Walser, and Woolf.

They’re incredible little books, and the stories remind me a lot of Augosto Monterroso’s. For the most part the stories are very short—some are only a few lines long—and fable-like, and some of the stories feature the writer/artist as main characters.

Jerusalem came out from Dalkey in the fall of 2009 in Anna Kushner’s translation to a lot of great attention. It’s great that they’re also doing Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique, which, as mentioned above is translated by Daniel Hahn.

Daniel is a great translator who I had the chance to meet at the Salzburg Global Seminar on translation a few years ago. He’s most well-known as a translator for his work on Jose Agualusa, and is currently an interim co-director (with fellow Salzburg alum Kate Griffin) of the British Centre for Literary Translation in East Anglia.

Later this week we’ll be posting an interview with Daniel, but for now, you can read an extended preview of Learning to Pray, which is described below:

In a city not quite of any particular era, a distant and calculating man named Lenz Buchmann works as a surgeon, treating his patients as little more than equations to be solved: life and death no more than results to be worked through without the least compassion. Soon, however, Buchmann’s ambition is no longer content with medicine, and he finds himself rising through the ranks of his country’s ruling party . . . until a diagnosis transforms this likely future president from a leading player into just another victim. In language that is at once precise, clinical, and oddly childlike, Gonçalo M. Tavares—the Portuguese novelist hailed by José Saramago as the greatest of his generation—here brings us another chilling investigation into the limits of human experience, mapping the creation and then disintegration of a man we might call “evil,” and showing us how he must learn to adapt in a world he can no longer dominate.