{"id":301116,"date":"2015-04-22T11:20:58","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T11:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2015\/04\/22\/why-this-book-should-win-talking-to-ourselves-by-btba-judge-jeremy-garber\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:21","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:21","slug":"why-this-book-should-win-talking-to-ourselves-by-btba-judge-jeremy-garber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/04\/22\/why-this-book-should-win-talking-to-ourselves-by-btba-judge-jeremy-garber\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Book Should Win \u2013 Talking to Ourselves by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell\u2019s Books<\/a> and also a freelance reviewer.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Talking to Ourselves<\/i><\/a> \u2013 Andr\u00e9s Neuman, Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, Argentina
\nFarrar, Straus and Giroux<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps the question shouldn\u2019t be why Andr\u00e9s Neuman\u2019s Talking to Ourselves<\/i> deserves to win this year\u2019s Best Translated Book Award<\/a> \u2013 but why it doesn\u2019t. That would be a silly query, however, as Neuman\u2019s novel is an outstanding accomplishment in every regard. Despite being a mere 150 pages, Talking to Ourselves<\/i> offers a rich and rewarding reading experience the likes of which are difficult to discover in a book two or three times its length.<\/p>\n

Neuman, born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, has already garnered international acclaim and a number of prestigious awards (including the Alfaguara Prize and Spain\u2019s National Critics Prize). When he was merely 22, Neuman\u2019s debut novel, Bariloche<\/i> (as yet untranslated into English), was the only finalist for the Herralde Prize \u2013 losing out to Marcos Giralt Torrente\u2019s Paris<\/i><\/a> (coincidentally, a fellow longlist title for this year\u2019s BTBA<\/span>). Neuman likely first garnered the attention of English readers via the effusive praise of the late Roberto Bola\u00f1o. <\/p>\n

The Chilean\u2019s claims rang more than true when Neuman\u2019s spectacular Traveler of the Century<\/i><\/a> was published in English translation in 2012. Traveler of the Century<\/i>, a nearly 600-page epic of beauty, wonder, politics, poetry, love, and translation, could not be more dissimilar from Talking to Ourselves<\/i>. In fact, it\u2019s marvelous to think that these two exceptional books were even written by the same hand (or imagination, for that matter). Whereas Traveler of the Century<\/i> was a weighty novel of ideas, Talking to Ourselves<\/i> is a succinct look at illness, loss, literature, and familial bonds.<\/p>\n

Writing in the voices of three disparate, but unifying characters (a wife\/mother, husband\/father, and their 10-year old son), Neuman captures the individual personalities and nuances of the trio with impressive dexterity. As father and son embark on what may well be their last journey together (on account of the elder\u2019s terminal cancer), each of three characters strives to share their innermost thoughts \u2013 at least with themselves, if unable to do so with one another.<\/p>\n

While Talking to Ourselves<\/i> is a doleful work of fiction, it radiates a warmth and authenticity that is entirely compelling. Both Neuman\u2019s lustrous prose and his keen insights into the inner world of the individual (and, ultimately, the questions of life, love, and death itself) meld with his natural gift for storytelling \u2013 resulting in a novel that is so beautiful, so sad, so brilliant, that one cannot imagine a single sentence out of place. It\u2019s simply that good.<\/p>\n

Talking to Ourselves<\/i> was the very first book I read in 2014 and 51 weeks later, there wasn\u2019t another title that had moved or captivated me so entirely. Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia\u2019s translation reads fluidly and their efforts in rendering three distinct voices is in and of itself a merited accomplishment. Andr\u00e9s Neuman writes gracefully and his compassion, intellect, and sheer love of storytelling are evident on every page. Talking to Ourselves<\/i> deserves to win this year\u2019s Best Translated Book Award, perhaps most of all because it does everything masterful fiction ought to: it dazzles with prose, affects our minds, touches our hearts, and, not least, reminds as that the stories we may think are ours alone are, in fact, the same the world over.<\/p>\n

\u2026a question only kids ask themselves for real, and then we sick people ask it again: is it okay to lie?, is it okay to be lied to?, a healthy grown-up won\u2019t even give it a thought, the answer seems obvious, right?, we learn to tell lies the same way we learn to talk, they teach us how to talk and then how to be quiet, I don\u2019t know, like when you play football, for example, first you kick the ball and then, unless you\u2019re stupid, you learn not to kick it, to move around tricking the other players, kids lie too, of course, I lied all the time when I was a kid, but, what I\u2019m saying is, until you get to a certain age, you think it\u2019s wrong, that is the difference, I don\u2019t think we grown-ups are any worse, you know?, every kid contains the beginnings of a possible son of a bitch, this much I know, it\u2019s just that kids, and perhaps we adults are to blame for this, start by dividing the world into good and evil, truth and lies, the only time it\u2019s okay for them to lie is when they\u2019re playing, then it\u2019s allowed, so kids become grown-ups when they play, sort of the opposite of us parents, we play so we can be kids again, well, and then you grow up, and you lie and are lied to, and it isn\u2019t wrong, until one day, when you\u2019re sick, you begin to worry again about lies, you worry about them every time you talk to the doctors, your wife, your family, it\u2019s not a moral question, it\u2019s, I don\u2019t know, something physical, deep down you\u2019re scared stiff of the truth, but the idea of dying with a lie scares you even more, lies help us to carry on living, don\u2019t they?, and when you know you aren\u2019t going to carry on, you feel they\u2019re no use anymore, do you know what I mean?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell\u2019s Books and also a freelance reviewer. Talking to Ourselves \u2013 Andr\u00e9s Neuman, Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, Argentina Farrar, Straus and Giroux Perhaps the question shouldn\u2019t be why Andr\u00e9s Neuman\u2019s Talking to Ourselves deserves to win this year\u2019s Best Translated Book Award […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[60346,60546,21496,2226,56406,38636,58226,7676,1646,36,56416,54936],"class_list":["post-301116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba2015-fiction-longlist","tag-and-giroux","tag-andres-neuman","tag-argentina","tag-farrar","tag-jeremy-garber","tag-lorenzo-garcia","tag-nick-caistor","tag-review","tag-spanish","tag-straus","tag-talking-to-ourselves"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316766,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301116\/revisions\/316766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}