Bookshelf: Words Without Borders Book Reviews
Suitcase of Books
Our editors thought the following books would be of special interest to our readers.
 AMERIKA: THE MISSING PERSON by Franz KafkaTranslated from the German by Mark Harman Schocken Books, 2008 Reviewed by Eugene Sampson "Does the publication of an edition that approximates the handwritten manuscripts give us a new Kafka?"(more...) |
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 FIVE SPICE STREET by Can XueTranslated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping Yale University Press, 2009 Reviewed by Brendan Patrick Hughes "Who is Madam X? Madam X sells peanuts at the stand with the red-painted sign. Madam X is an occultist, a collector of mirrors and corrupter of neighborhood children. Madam X is a home wrecker. Madam X is a threat to communal harmony and morality."(more...) |
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 SUPERMARKET by Satoshi AzuchiTranslated from the Japanese by Paul Warham Thomas Dunne, 2009 Reviewed by Juliet Grames "Kojima, a starry-eyed idealist, thinks the supermarket will offer the sense of fulfillment that his soulless job at the bank lacked."(more...) |
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 FOR THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF THE WALNUT by Takashi HiraideTranslated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu New Directions, 2008 Reviewed by Alecs Mickunas ""Nakayasu's translation does not stand beside the original as though anticipating or even inviting scrutiny. Instead, like a walnut, the original work and the translation form two halves"(more...) |
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 PIGEON POST by Dumitru TsepeneagTranslated from the French by Jane Kuntz Dalkey Archive Press, 2008 Reviewed by Stefanie Sobelle "Communication, Tsepeneag suggests, is a collaborative process. 'I couldn't write a novel unless I had domestic help,' quips the narrator"(more...) |
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 NEW LIVES by Ingo SchulzeTranslated from the German by John E. Woods Alfred A. Knopf, 2008 Reviewed by Bob Buckeye "New Lives is less the epistolary novel Turmer tells Nicoletta he is writing, than a scholarly text with a critical apparatus, similar to Nabokov's Pale Fire"(more...) |
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 HOW THE SOLDIER REPAIRS THE GRAMOPHONE by Saša StanišićTranslated from the German by Anthea Bell Grove Press, 2008 Reviewed by Anne McPeak "What's going to happen is so improbable that there'll be no improbability left for a made-up story."(more...) |
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 THE LANDSCAPIST: SELECTED POEMS by Pierre Martory;Translated from the French by John Ashbery Sheep Meadow Press, 2008 Reviewed by Jeannie Vanasco From swans with amputated purple wings, to a gnome with a hairlip, to a tired unicorn dreaming "of yelling schoolboys, Plato badly digested," Pierre Martory's collection The Landscapist is certainly one of the most unusual and intriguing books of contemporary poetry.(more...) |
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 TO SIBERIA by Per PettersenTranslated from the Norwegian by Anne Born Graywolf Press, 2008 Reviewed by Alex Young We know from the narrator's adolescence in Northern Denmark that that she is intelligent, willful, and working-class, but there is also the lingering sense that at some point something went very wrong.(more...) |
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 ONE SOLDIER'S WAR by Arkady BabchenkoTranslated from the Russian by Nick Allen Grove Press, 2008 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye For Arkady Babchenko, there is no way out. Drafted in 1995 to fight in the first Chechen war, he re-upped in 1999 to fight in the second one. There would never be any life again but the war(more...) |
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 THE TAKER AND OTHER STORIES by Rubem FonsecaTranslated from the Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers Open Letter, 2008 Reviewed by Dan Bevacqua In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky writes, "Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends . . . " (more...) |
 CHICAGO by Alaa Al AswanyTranslated from the Arabic by Farouk Abdel Wahab HarperCollins, 2008 Reviewed by Stefanie Sobelle Since the publication of his successful debut The Yacoubian Building (2004), Alaa Al Aswany has become one of Egypt's most celebrated writers, a vocal opponent to the corruption and nepotism that have characterized . . . (more...) |
 SAN JUAN: MEMOIR OF A CITY by Edgardo Rodriguez JuliaTranslated from the Spanish by Peter Grambois University of Wisconsin Press, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye Cities impose their will upon us, and what we say about them has as much to do with "the regimen cities keep over imagination" as it does with us.(more...) |
 LAUNDRY by Suzane AdamTranslated from the Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay Autumn Hill Books, 2008 Reviewed by Diana Thow The story begins in a swirl: "For two days I've been running around, trying to understand, put things together, find some clarity, explain. Not lose my mind." (more...) |
 ON A DAY LIKE THIS by Peter StammTranslated from the German by Michael Hofmann Other Press, 2008 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye When Andreas, the narraor of Peter Stamm's On a Day Like This, first arrives in Paris from Switzerland to teach school, he sees Chet Baker play. . . .(more...) |
 KHIRBET KHIZEH by S. YizharTranslated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck Ibis Editions, 2008 Reviewed by Tsipi Keller Long considered a classic, Khirbet Khizah—also spelled Hirbet Hizeh (Arabic: The Ruins of Hizah)—was first published in Israel in 1949, some months after the end of the 1948-49 war. . . . (more...) |
 THE POST-OFFICE GIRL by Stefan ZweigTranslated from the German by Joel Rotenberg New York Review Books, 2008 Reviewed by Joseph V. Tirella Cultural critic Clive James has called Stefan Zweig "the incarnation of humanism," and a fairer and more apt four-word assessment of the late Austrian writer and his work could not be imagined. . . . (more...) |
 METROPOLE by Ferenc KarinthyTranslated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes Telegram, 2008 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye To write of Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole is to emphasize, as Nietzsche reminds us, that we need history, "but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it." Metropole, like Kafka's Trial, . . . (more...) |
 QUICK FIX by Ana Maria ShuaTranslated from the Spanish by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan White Pine Press, 2008 Reviewed by Zack Rogow Flash fiction, sudden fiction, short short fiction—the high school students I’ve taught prefer the term "nanofiction" for this genre because of the connection with their iPods. This compressed form has flowered in Latin America . . . (more...) |
 THE HAKAWATI by Rabih AlameddineAlfred A. Knopf, 2008 Reviewed by Randa Jarrar Rabih Alameddine has spun a honeycomb of fable, family history, and Lebanese lore in his newest novel, The Hakawati. I was struck initially by the book’s title, the Arabic word for “storyteller.” . . . (more...) |
 THE LOST DAUGHTER by Elena FerranteTranslated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Europa Editions, 2008 Reviewed by Joseph V. Tirella "The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand." With that simple and unnerving sentence on the second page of this astonishingly economic novel, author Elena Ferrante is giving readers fair warning: brace yourselves . . . (more...) |
 VIA DELLE OCHE by Carlo LucarelliTranslated from the Italian by Michael Reynolds Europa Editions, 2008 Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky If more historical crime fiction were like Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy, I'd probably read more of it than I do now. What makes Lucarelli's brand different? For one thing, the De Luca books are compact and almost devoid of picturesque period detail. (more...) |
 THE MODEL by Lars Saabye ChristensenTranslated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett Arcadia, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye "Historians who constantly present their Scotland Yard credentials," T. J. Clark writes, "never fail to miss what the real crime was."* In The Model, Lars Saabye Christensen makes certain that Scotland Yard historians are not disappointed. (more...) |
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 THE DIVING POOL: THREE NOVELLAS by Yoko OgawaTranslated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder Picador, 2008 Reviewed by Christopher Cox The Diving Pool is the first collection by Ogawa to appear in English. Because she is relatively unknown to American readers, Picador has gone out of its way in promoting the book to assure us that she "has won every major Japanese literary award." On the evidence of this collection, Ogawa deserves whatever accolades have come her way. (more...) |
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 THE OLD CHILD & OTHER STORIES and THE BOOK OF WORDS by Jenny ErpenbeckTranslated from the German by Susan Bernofsky New Directions, 2005, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye In Jenny Erpenbeck's fiction, girls are tabula rasa to be instructed step by step by teachers and fathers (state substitutes) to be handmaidens. They are empty vessels to be filled, captives in training to serve. (more...) |
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 TO THIS DAY BY S. Y. AgnonTranslated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin Toby Press, 2008 Reviewed by Tsipi Keller "During the Great War, I lived in the west of Berlin, in a room with a balcony in a small boarding house on Fasanenstrasse." So begins To This Day, Agnon's shortest novel, first published in Hebrew in 1952. (more...) |
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 MISSING SOLUCH BY MAHMOUD DOWLATABADITranslated from the Farsi by Kamran Rastegar Melville House, 2007 Reviewed by Elham Gheytanchi Published during revolutionary times in Iran in 1979, Missing Soluch is a 500-page tribute to the socialist ideas that so enthused the Iranian intellectuals and writers of that period. (more...) |
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 IN HER ABSENCE BY ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINATranslated from the Spanish by Esther Allen Other Press, 2007 Reviewed by Michael K. Johnson Mario Lopez, a provincial bureaucrat in 1980's Spain, returns home from work to receive a passionate kiss from the young, sophisticated wife he thought had left him for good just a few days before.(more...) |
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 SOUL BY ANDREY PLATONOVTranslated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, with Katie Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman NYRB Classics, 2007 Reviewed by Alex Wenger Andrey Platonov brings out grand claims in others. Most excellent writers do this, but Platonov perhaps belongs in a special league.(more...) |
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 THE REBELS BY SANDOR MARAITranslated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes Vintage, 2008 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye "The dead were fast swimmers. Sometimes they kept company, arriving in twos and threes, racing each other through town at night." Life would not be the same again, particularly for graduating seniors whose futures were already foreclosed by war.(more...) |
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 THE BAD GIRL BY MARIO VARGAS LLOSATranslated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007 Reviewed by Brendan Hughes Mario Vargas Llosa's engaging novel The Bad Girl is not only a story of thwarted love, it is a haunted swath of the third world diaspora. Its characters are cast about the globe like seeds in the wind.(more...) |
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 NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON BY PASCAL MERCIERTranslated from the German by Barbara Harshav Grove Press, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye We speak about the book that changed our life, the encounter that sent us down a path, the person who turned us around. It is at such moments we say we become who we are, and we can no longer, as Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson discovers, return to the life we left. (more...) |
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 THE FLYING CAMEL AND THE GOLDEN HUMP BY AHARON MEGGEDTranslated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden Toby Press, 2007 Reviewed by Tsipi Keller Published in Israel in 1982, and narrated in forty-two titled chapters, The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump, is an octopus of a novel, its referential tentacles reaching deep into the Western literary canon, as well as into the Mishna and the Talmud, all very much alive and vivid in the protagonist’s, Kalman Keren, large and generous imagination. (more...) |
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 GUANTANAMO BY DOROTHEA DIECKMANNTranslated from the German by Tim Mohr Soft Skull, 2007 Reviewed by Christopher Cox The United States has secret prisons spread throughout the world and a detention facility at a military base in Cuba specifically created to extract information from its inmates, most of whom are never charged with a crime. Faced with this news, Dorothea Dieckmann avoids high-minded rhetoric and angry condemnations (unlikely to be heard by the American government in any case, and none-too-rare as well) in favor of a short but potent novel that explores what imprisonment in this system does to one innocent man. (more...) |
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 NINE BY ANDRZEJ STASIUKTranslated from the Polish by Bill Johnston Harcourt, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye It is the blasted landscape the films of Bela Tarr, Fred Kelemen and Ilya Khrzhanovsky conditioned us to see. A vista the surrealist landscapes of Jan Saudek opened up. The grim, abandoned backwater of an Eastern Europe writhing under runaway capitalism. We have entered Tarkovsky’s Zone. Raskolnikov stalks the streets of St. Petersburg. The bicycle chain swings in the street. An eye is gouged out.(more...) |
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 THE TANGO SINGER BY TOMAS ELOY MARTINEZTranslated from the Spanish by Anne McLean Bloomsbury, 2006 Reviewed by Margaret Carson Bruno Cadogan, a doctoral student in Spanish Literature at New York University, is making little progress on his dissertation, a study of Jorge Luis Borges's essays on the tango. As he wanders through the Village, a chance encounter with a specialist in Latin American culture launches him in a new direction... (more ...) |
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 THE BELLY OF THE ATLANTIC BY FATOU DIOMETranslated from the French by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz Serpent's Tail, 2006 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye The third-world native must leave home if he is not only to succeed but also triumph. If he does so, he can never be at home again. Salie, the Senegalese native, who narrates The Belly of the Atlantic, says on a visit to Niodior, the Senegalese island where she was born, that, "I go home as a tourist in my own country, for I have become the other for the people I continue to call my family." (more ...) |
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 THE MAIAS BY ECA DE QUEIROSTranslated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa New Directions, 2007 Reviewed by Alex Wenger In a preface to the 1903 printing of his novel A rebours, Joris-Karl Huysmans lamented the greatness of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. The "paradigm of Naturalism," the novel fired a generation of writers. But: "it brought us little profit. It was perfect down to the last detail, and even Flaubert himself could not write another such; we were all reduced…to beating and roaming about parallel tracks that had already been explored." (more ...) |
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 ALLAH IS NOT OBLIGED BY AHMADOU KOUROUMATranslated from the French by Frank Wynne Anchor Books, 2007 Reviewed by Christopher Cox I was on a bus in Mali, somewhere in the desert between Bamako and Ségou, when we suddenly lurched to a stop. The sun was just starting to set, and the man sitting next to me said solemnly, "It's time for prayers." As we all shuffled off the bus, he threw his arm around the shoulders of the man sitting across the aisle and said, "Come on friend, let's go pray.".(more ...) |
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 A RUSSIAN DIARY BY ANNA POLITKOVSKAYATranslated from the Russian by Arch Tait Random House, 2007 Reviewed by Michelle Risley Anna Politkovskaya’s brutal murder reveals the incredible risks and the dangers she faced as a journalist reporting on the limitations of Russian democracy. A Russian Diary, her blow-by-blow catalogue of power abuses by and under Putin's government was being translated when, on October 6, 2006, she was shot pointblank in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building.(more ...) |
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 LOST PARADISE BY CEES NOOTEBOOMTranslated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty Grove Press, 2007 Reviewed by Robert Buckeye One does. She, someone, she is not sure, leaves her home in a wealthy neighborhood of Sao Paolo and drives, she does not know why, perhaps it had been the car or Bjork on the tape deck that had done the driving, to "the very worst favela of all, a hell rather than a paradise," where the engine dies and the favela dwellers come out of the night, "a hate and rage so deep that they could swallow you up forever" and leave her behind, "as if she were rubbish." (more ...) |
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 MONTANO'S MALADY BY ENRIQUE VILA-MATASTranslated from the Spanish by Jonathan Dunne New Directions, paperback, 2007 Reviewed by Michael Kern Johnson In his second novel to be published in English in the US, Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas follows, sometimes quite literally, in the footsteps of authors as various as Cervantes, Montaigne, and Musil in a bi-continental search for the purpose of literature in a shifting world that seems evermore to question the need for literature. (more ...) |
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 WRITTEN LIVES BY JAVIER MARIASTranslated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa New Directions, paperback, 2007 Reviewed by Alex Wenger It is a small but unmistakable invitation to chaos in the prologue to his newly translated Written Lives when Javier Marias deadpans that he has made up "almost nothing" in the content of this book. Written Lives is a collection of biographies of canonical authors, and making up anything would constitute an act of mischief upon both the reader and literary history as a whole. (more ...) |
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 BESIDE & OTHER STORIES BY URI NISSAN GNESSINTranslated from the Hebrew by various translators Toby Press, 2007 Reviewed by Tsipi Keller Uri Nissan Gnessin was born in 1879 in a small town in the Ukraine. His father was a rabbi (a Lubavitcher), yet in addition to studying at his father`s yeshiva, Gnessin, with his father’s perhaps reluctant permission, immersed himself in secular subjects, seeing himself as part of the Haskala (Enlightenment) Movement (more ...) |
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 PARADISE TRAVEL BY JORGE FRANCOTranslated from the Spanish by Katharine Silver Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2006 Reviewed by Harry Morales Paradise Travel, the entrancing new novel by Jorge Franco, offers a heartbreaking and illuminating glimpse of the multi-faceted and confusing world of illegal immigrants in the U.S. (more ...) |
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 THE MYSTERY GUEST BY GREGOIRE BOUILLIERTranslated from the French by Lorin Stein Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2006 Reviewed by Richard McGill Murphy In the middle of a cold Sunday afternoon, a thirty-year-old Frenchman sleeps on the sofa in his darkened Paris apartment. The phone rings. He picks up the receiver and hears the voice of the woman who left him four years earlier without a word of explanation. None is forthcoming: after four years of silence, his vanished lover has simply called to invite him to a friend's birthday party. Thus begins The Mystery Guest, a brief but spirited romp through the jungles of masculine insecurity. (more ...) |
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 A HEART SO WHITE BY JAVIAR MARIASTranslated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa New Directions, 2002 Reviewed by Samantha Schnee In A Heart So White Javier Marías examines the commonplace yet peculiar institution of marriage and all its attendant secrets and betrayals. Juan is a newlywed translator who shuttles between the UN in New York and the Hague for six to eight weeks at a time, while his young bride Luisa, also a translator, remains behind in Madrid to establish their home together. In Juan's absence she develops a close relationship with her enigmatic father-in-law, a charismatic art dealer named Ranz who, though in his seventies, has not lost the charm that enabled him to marry three times despite the fact that his first wife died mysteriously and the second committed suicide upon returning from their honeymoon.(more ...) |
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 PRELIMINARIES BY S. YIZHARTranslated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange Introduction by Dan Miron Toby Press, 2007 Reviewed by Tsipi Keller S (milansky) Yizhar (1916-2006) was born in Rehovot, in what was then Ottoman Palestine. His father, Ze'ev Smilansky, also a writer, had arrived from Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, and, like the father plowing a field in the first pages of Preliminaries, had come to take part in "the spectacle of the birth of the new Jew in the new Land," carrying two books, "the Bible on one side and Tolstoy on the other, stuffed among clothes that are unsuited to the climate and the work." (more ...) |
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Out Stealing Horses and In the Wake by Per Petterson |
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The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño |
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A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, by Anonymous |
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A Woman in Jerusalem by A. B. Yehoshua |
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Almond by Nedjma |
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Amulet by Roberto Bolaño |
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Big Breasts & Wide Hips by Mo Yan |
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The Book about Blanche and Marie by Per Olov Enquist |
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Captain of the Sleepers by Mayra Montero |
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Celestial Harmonies by Péter Esterházy |
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Chile: A Traveler's Literary Companion edited by Katherine Silver Marvelously concise yet richly detailed, here are twenty-two short stories by Chilean masters. |
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Conjugal Love by Alberto Moravia |
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The Double by Jose Saramago |
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Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi |
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Götz and Meyer by David Albahari |
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Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas |
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The Heretic by Miguel Delibes |
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I Loved You for Your Voice by Sélim Nassib |
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In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar |
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The Inquisitors' Manual by Antonio Lobo Antunes |
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Inside and Other Short Fiction: Japanese Women on Japanese Women, compiled by Cathy Layne |
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The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey by Salman Rushdie |
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Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño |
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Lizard Tails by Juan Marsé |
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Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón |
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Lovers of Algeria by Anouar Benmalek |
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Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia |
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Monologue of a Dog: New Poems by Wisława Szymborska |
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Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg by Nina Berberova |
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The Nimrod Flipout by Etgar Keret |
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The Noodle Maker by Ma Jian |
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Q by Luther Blissett |
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S. A Novel of the Balkans by Slavenka Drakulić |
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Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih |
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The Silent Steppe by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov |
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Snow by Orhan Pamuk |
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Solibo Magnificent by Patrick Chamoiseau |
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Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian |
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The Successor by Ismail Kadare |
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Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky |
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Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin |
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The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare |
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The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato |
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We by Yevgeny Zamyatin |
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White on Black by Ruben Gallego |
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World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova |
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The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany |
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