yale university press – Three Percent

“The Book of Collateral Damage” by Sinan Antoon [Why This Book Should Win]

Chad Post — Tue, 05 May 2020 13:29:19 +0000

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles .��

Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Quarterly Conversation, Book Riot, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Rumpus and other online publications. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram

��by Sinan Antoon, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright (Yale University Press)

The protagonist of Sinan Antoon��Ĵ�ý�s novel, The Book of Collateral Damage, is an Iraqi expat who returns to Baghdad as a translator. Nameer is hired by a pair of Americans filming a documentary. It��Ĵ�ý�s his first time back since his family emigrated to the United States when he was a child.

While in Iraq he decides to visit the bookshops on al-Mutanabbi Street. There he meets a bookseller named Wadood who is working on an unusual project: a kind of catalog of the objects destroyed in the bombings. It includes commonplace items like a handmade kashan, a stamp album and a stone wall. But also a fetus, a Ziziphus (or Christ��Ĵ�ý�s Thorn) tree, and a pair of twins. His stories are often told from the point of view, and in the voice, of the anthropomorphized objects. Structured as colloquies, or ��Ĵ�ý�conversations,��Ĵ�ý� they call to mind the Aesop��Ĵ�ý�s fables and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales. Nameer, intrigued, tries to convince Wadood to let him translate the writings into English. And Wadood, considering the offer, leaves a copy of his manuscript at Nameer��Ĵ�ý�s hotel in an envelope. Nameer takes it back to America with him.

Yoko Ogawa��Ĵ�ý�s The Memory Police, another book on this year��Ĵ�ý�s longlist, is also concerned with the disappearance of everyday things. Particularly the items we most take for granted. In both Ogawa��Ĵ�ý�s and Antoon��Ĵ�ý�s writing the empty spaces left behind are imbued with emotional and cultural significance. In The Memory Police, each disappearance is a loss to the community, but one which most of the community accepts in silence. There is a gentleness to her descriptions, and a tangible sadness. Even if they don��Ĵ�ý�t remember what they��Ĵ�ý�ve forgotten, they remain aware of the act of forgetting. In The Book of Collateral Damage the colloquies are more violent, but no less haunting. Each loss is a complete erasure and the human component, as perpetrators and victims, is surprisingly powerful��Ĵ�ý�even when described by an inanimate object without contextual awareness.

I say ��Ĵ�ý�my mother��Ĵ�ý� because I claim that she loved me as if I were her son. I remember how her son used to cry in her arms when she fed me. He and his three brothers. But he��Ĵ�ý�s grown up now. But even so she told him off when he tried to persuade her to get rid of me and replace me. ��Ĵ�ý�But this oven is older than you. It has fed you and your brothers since your father died and it has helped pay your university fees. I won��Ĵ�ý�t let it go till I die,��Ĵ�ý� she said. She used to swear by me, saying, ��Ĵ�ý�By this oven!��Ĵ�ý�

After returning to the United States, Nameer takes a job at Harvard, and then NYU, teaching Arabic language and literature. He keeps the manuscript. Years pass. He completes his dissertation, falls in love, and remains in contact with Wadood��Ĵ�ý�though the ongoing war and Wadood��Ĵ�ý�s personal situation make it difficult at times to stay in touch. Nameer remains obsessed with translating Wadood��Ĵ�ý�s stories, despite Wadood asking him not to. Nameer has also begun collecting articles and pictures from newspapers about the continuing war in Iraq. He hangs them on his apartment walls in hope they will provide him with the inspiration he needs to write a novel of his own.

The Book of Collateral Damage reads as semi-autobiographical. At one point, Nameer talks about an idea he has for a novel about a young man who washes the corpses of the dead in Iraq��Ĵ�ý�pretty much the plot of Antoon��Ĵ�ý�s 2013 novel, The Corpse Washer. His protagonist identifies with Iraq as his home country, but as an American he is far removed from the actual fighting. The truth is that other than a few insensitive colleagues, and family members who still reside in Iraq but with whom he doesn��Ĵ�ý�t seem particularly close, the war barely impacts his day-to-day life. And, yet, he struggles and cries out in his sleep. He��Ĵ�ý�s often angry and unhappy. He carries the war inside him and his girlfriend believes he suffers from P.T.S.D. As the book goes on we see that the occupation of Iraq has affected Nameer and Wadood differently, but both men carry emotional and psychological damage because of it.

I was going to ask him whether he knew that in Arabic the words for hope and pain were almost the same, with just the two consonants transposed��Ĵ�ý�amal and alam.

Most of what I��Ĵ�ý�ve written so far is plot summary, barely touching on the overarching themes or the translation or how strange it was to be reading this book while I, like other non-essential workers, sit at home in obeyance of stay-at-home orders issued in response to a global pandemic. Antoon is very good at capturing the strangeness (and frustration) of living tangential to, yet still affected by, historical events. Years from now, when someone asks what it was like during COVID-19, what do we say? We stayed at home, took long walks, sewed masks and worried about how to pay our bills. While the men and women in hospitals and grocery stores, distribution centers and manufacturing, public service and food delivery, still went to work every day. Nameer wants to do something, to have some positive impact on what is happening in Iraq, when in reality he is both helpless and irrelevant. He is also aware of the hypocrisy of his position. It��Ĵ�ý�s not all that hard to relate.

Should this book win The Best Translated Book Award? Maybe. If I��Ĵ�ý�m being honest . . . I don��Ĵ�ý�t know. Its chances seem slim, when you consider that I��Ĵ�ý�m writing about it rather than one of this year��Ĵ�ý�s judges. My recommendation is read it anyway. Jonathan Wright��Ĵ�ý�s translation is keen and light. He wisely lets the plot bear the weight, not the prose. It��Ĵ�ý�s a good book. And a good reminder that our present situation is just another blip in the history of civilization. Antoon writes about the Iraq war from a different perspective than we��Ĵ�ý�re used to seeing. Nameer is both Iraqi and American. He is aware that he is in a privileged situation��Ĵ�ý�working for an elite university and living comfortably in one of the most expensive cities in the world. His family remains safe. In one sense, the bookseller Wadood is a thread that stretches between Baghdad and Manhattan, allowing Nameer a connection to a country and a war he feels increasingly removed from. As I said, Antoon writes best about ordinary people caught on the periphery of battle. He does so honestly, without shying away from the truth about his characters or their situations, even when those truths are sometimes unattractive and those situations far outside our ability to control.

Melancholy

Kaija Straumanis — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 16:00:00 +0000

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 and mystery cults of the ancient Greeks, the Hippocratic theory of bodily humors and the medieval astrology of fateful planets, the Renaissance preeminence of the individual and the Romantic inclination toward oblivion, the heartsickness of lover and beloved, the mental and neurological illnesses defined by modern medical science, and the personal dread of ��Ĵ�ý�real things passing��Ĵ�ý� or the end of temporary existential illusion in the permanence of loss and death.

Heavy stuff��Ĵ�ý�as one might expect from a title like Melancholy.

Yet readers looking for insight into their own or others��Ĵ�ý� feelings have often been drawn to such works. Admirers of Robert Burton��Ĵ�ý�s magisterial 1621 volume The Anatomy of Melancholy may find themselves pleased to be introduced here to the fifteenth-century Three Books on Life by the Italian Renaissance writer Marcilio Ficino, which, according to Földényi, ��Ĵ�ý�alongside Burton��Ĵ�ý�s massive tome, is the other most important work on melancholia.��Ĵ�ý� For fans of books such as Andrew Solomon��Ĵ�ý�s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, however, Földényi��Ĵ�ý�s old-school approach, with monolithic paragraphs built upon copious footnotes and a bibliography of fourteen and a half single-spaced pages of sources, could easily appear scholarly to the point of impenetrability.

No fault lies with the translation from Hungarian, a Herculean labor executed with deceptive ease throughout by Tim Wilkinson, rendering the most opaque of Földényi��Ĵ�ý�s passages with remarkable clarity of diction. The question is whether readers will discover enough value in this dense text to feel their efforts have been rewarded. One of the most memorable and accessible points Földényi provides in the opening chapter is that in antiquity, melancholia was honored as a hallmark of people gifted with the capacity for extraordinary achievements: though they always faced the risk of succumbing to harmful despair and madness, their drive to overcome those dangers with great accomplishments could be helpful to everyone. In a later chapter, Földényi examines how the stargazers of the Middle Ages came to view melancholics as ��Ĵ�ý�Saturn��Ĵ�ý�s children,��Ĵ�ý� subject to the patterns and influence of the heavenly spheres. A reader hoping to better understand the melancholic setting and lives of the characters in László Krasznahorkai��Ĵ�ý�s terrific Hungarian novel The Melancholy of Resistance can glean some useful insights from Földényi partway through the last chapter, ��Ĵ�ý�Trembling from Freedom.��Ĵ�ý� Yet the poetry of these notions is not Földényi��Ĵ�ý�s priority. His focus is comparative, the way different eras of related societies regarded, understood, and reacted to essentially the same condition.

Of Burton��Ĵ�ý�s Anatomy of Melancholy, Földényi asserts that ��Ĵ�ý�even after reading the more than one thousand pages of that work, one finds it impossible to define melancholia precisely��Ĵ�ý�but having fought one��Ĵ�ý�s way through the labyrinths of the melancholic interpretation of life, one is nonetheless left richer in experience, if not in knowledge.��Ĵ�ý� Földényi��Ĵ�ý�s book originally appeared in 1984. In a 1986-88 essay entitled ��Ĵ�ý�Melancholy��Ĵ�ý� (collected in Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays), the Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas, author of Parallel Stories and A Book of Memories, says much the same is true of Földényi��Ĵ�ý�s Melancholy: ��Ĵ�ý�When one reads this book, the image arises of being in a dead space but besieged by a desire to know. . . . Whoever reads this book will feel more precisely what melancholy is but will understand it less.��Ĵ�ý� (Like Földényi, Nádas examines melancholy in Homeric myth and through close analysis of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.) As a reader, though, I would tend to say just the opposite: reading the three hundred twenty-five pages of Földényi��Ĵ�ý�s Melancholy may leave one feeling more knowledgeable about how and what melancholia has been considered in the past but neither more enriched nor precise in experiencing the feeling of melancholy life itself.

The Hatred of Music

Kaija Straumanis — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 14:00:00 +0000

Pascal Quignard��Ĵ�ý�s __The Hatred of Music_ is the densest, most arcane, most complex book I��Ĵ�ý�ve read in ages. It��Ĵ�ý�s also a book that covers a topic so basic, so universal��Ĵ�ý�almost primordial��Ĵ�ý�that just about any reader will be perversely thrilled by the intersections Quignard unearths between the mind and the world of sound. And that topic is just that: sound. How all manner of sounds constitute music, how some predate music and how our perception of sound��Ĵ�ý�our history with it��Ĵ�ý�affects our appreciation of music.

The nonfiction book is divided into what Quignard terms 10 treatises, but it often reads like a collection of connected fragments from the author��Ĵ�ý�s journal. Entries are separated by a small bullet point, and the book feels in sections like a prose poem, or really, at times a riddle. As The New Yorker has noted, Quignard is a writer with ��Ĵ�ý�an oblique, aphoristic bent.��Ĵ�ý� In an interesting and detailed Translator��Ĵ�ý�s Note at the end of the book, the author is quoted as saying the work falls into a category called ��Ĵ�ý�speculative rhetoric,��Ĵ�ý� and it��Ĵ�ý�s a type of writing, he says, that dates back to the invention of philosophy. Readers schooled not only in the classics but in the classics in their original language (Greek, Latin, French, et al) will be in good stead since the superb translators, Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck, preserve the richness of the original text by including snippets of the original languages.

Quignard, a noted novelist, music aficionado, and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is adept at illuminating the overlooked role that our sense of hearing plays in all things and all thoughts. One of the most poignant examples is St. Peter, the Catholic Apostle who is considered the religion��Ĵ�ý�s first Pope. According to the Christian Bible, Peter thrice denied Jesus as he was being led off to slaughter, only to hear the sound of a cock crowing, as his master had warned. Quignard tells us in the book��Ĵ�ý�s first treatise, called ��Ĵ�ý�The Tears of Saint Peter,��Ĵ�ý� ��Ĵ�ý�It is said that as Peter grew older he could no longer bear cocks.��Ĵ�ý� Indeed, he had any kind of animal of flight in and around his home killed. As I read this, I found myself grieving, if you will, for St. Peter, across the centuries. How he must have regretted his denial, how he must have been hemmed in by his mistake, which was marked forevermore in an inescapable shorthand by the sound of a bird��Ĵ�ý�s call. None of that ever occurred to me before reading Quignard��Ĵ�ý�s book.

In the book��Ĵ�ý�s eponymous, seventh treatise, he also makes the painfully astute observation that music was the only art to have been an instrument in the Nazis��Ĵ�ý� extermination of the Jews. The Germans used marches and other songs to reinforce discipline and compliance. Quignard quotes none other than Primo Levi as saying that the music heard in the camps ��Ĵ�ý�will be the last thing from the Lager we will forget��Ĵ�ý� because it is ��Ĵ�ý�the voice of the Lager.��Ĵ�ý�

Yet as dense and erudite as the book is, ��Ĵ�ý�The Hatred of Music��Ĵ�ý� abounds with short, pithy thoughts that cause the reader to wonder why these ideas aren��Ĵ�ý�t routinely bandied about in everyday conversation. In the second treatise, Quignard writes, ��Ĵ�ý�To hear is to be touched from afar.��Ĵ�ý� Oh, yes, c��Ĵ�ý�est vrai! A page later, he writes, ��Ĵ�ý�Before birth, until the final moment of death, men and women hear without a moment��Ĵ�ý�s respite. There is no sleep for hearing.��Ĵ�ý� Well, now that you mention it. In another section, a fragment reads simply, ��Ĵ�ý�Not knowing the name of what haunts us in sound.��Ĵ�ý� Yes, that. These ideas are collected in the chapter called, ��Ĵ�ý�It So Happens That Ears Have No Eyelids.��Ĵ�ý�

All of these straightforward yet profound statements build a case for hearing as perhaps the most powerful of the five senses, a hidden motor of activity that can be blamed for all manner of problems and conditions and predilections that travel with us from birth to death. It��Ĵ�ý�s as if he��Ĵ�ý�s peering into our thoughts.
In one especially evocative section, he speaks of the continuity of sound, even within our heads when nothing external could potentially reach our ears. He uses the term ��Ĵ�ý�surging hums,��Ĵ�ý� which strike us as we walk, modulating ��Ĵ�ý�according to the rhythm of our gait.��Ĵ�ý� What are these ��Ĵ�ý�surging hums��Ĵ�ý�? Hymns, he says. Old songs. ��Ĵ�ý�Childish and protective refrains. Lullabies and nursery rhymes. Polkas and waltzes. Singalong tunes.��Ĵ�ý� He��Ĵ�ý�s probing an internal soundtrack of which we are often dimly aware even as it��Ĵ�ý�s broadcast inside of our heads.

Indeed, he��Ĵ�ý�s often writing about things we sense but cannot articulate. He��Ĵ�ý�s writing about sound in a way that��Ĵ�ý�s arguably rare for the common reader in America to come upon, including this reviewer, but which nonetheless is germane and perceived on some level by every single person alive. That��Ĵ�ý�s because he��Ĵ�ý�s approaching sound as a primordial force within us, that is common to all of us, whether we routinely read the work of French essayists or not. To wit, he writes, ��Ĵ�ý�Nonvisual sounds, forever withdrawn from sight, roam within us. Ancient sounds tormented us. We did not yet see. We did not yet breathe. We did not yet scream. We heard.��Ĵ�ý� The thought is so true and essential that, though it appears only on page 9, one could put the book down, having already grasped something vital about the connection between sound and consciousness.

Yet a reviewer should issue this warning: Abandon all hope��Ĵ�ý�ye who read this book��Ĵ�ý�of traditional structure or tight narrative weave. As the journal Quarterly Conversation has noted about Quignard��Ĵ�ý�s oeuvre, ��Ĵ�ý�One is struck by the feeling that they are witnessing someone transcribing his thoughts, pure and fresh as they form in the mind, or to use a fitting mythological connection, Athena springing from the head of Zeus.��Ĵ�ý� Indeed, in the translators��Ĵ�ý� notes at the end of the book, they say Quignard strives to ��Ĵ�ý�make language an endeavor of disorientation,��Ĵ�ý� which often gives his prose a ��Ĵ�ý�refined coarseness.��Ĵ�ý�

Some of the sentences in the book are almost prohibitively arcane, including this gem: ��Ĵ�ý�There is a fragment by Pacuvius that formulates what interrupts the plurimillennial hammering march.��Ĵ�ý� This sentence is followed first by a sentence in French that is translated only in the footnotes and then by the same thought in Latin, which is untranslated. Which is not to suggest the translators, Amos and Rönnbäck, phoned this job in. On top of writing a comprehensive afterword, they have been careful to insert footnotes throughout the text, even indicating at one point where the popular definition of a word (formidable) deviates from Quignard��Ĵ�ý�s usage in the text. (Oh and, if ever a book needed a team of translators, it��Ĵ�ý�s this one.)

Here and there in the early sections of the text, Quignard signals how sound in the form of music has become his own personal torture device. For example, he writes, without elaboration, ��Ĵ�ý�The recent religion of happiness turns my stomach.��Ĵ�ý� Then in the book��Ĵ�ý�s ninth treatise, which is tellingly called ��Ĵ�ý�To Disenchant,��Ĵ�ý� he writes by way of explanation that music is now so ubiquitous in modern life that ��Ĵ�ý�it has become incessant, aggressing night and day, in the commercial streets of city centers, in shopping centers, in arcades, in departments stores . . . even at the beach . . .��Ĵ�ý� In the translators��Ĵ�ý� afterword, we learn that in 1994 Quignard suddenly retreated from all of his professional activities��Ĵ�ý�including his senior roles at the Gallimard publishing house and the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theater at Versailles. He resolved only to write in solitude.

One hopes Quignard will find the solitude he needs to write because this reviewer believes he could recount the entire history of literature through the lens of sound. And here��Ĵ�ý�s hoping he does just that.

Three Funny Books [My Year in Lists]

Chad Post — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 19:32:30 +0000

Before getting into today’s lists, I want to draw your attention to Largehearted Boy’s . This is just absurd—and it doesn’t even include all of these lists! Even if you eliminate all the entries on here that include Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (bad) and Franzen’s Purity (garbage), you’d still have enough book recommendations to stretch around the equator twice. Sometimes I feel like we live in an age of constant, all-consuming noise . . .

When I came up with the idea for today’s list—the funniest translations of 2015—I thought this would be easy. I was certain that I’d read a lot of humorous books over the past year, like . . . well, parts of Bellatin are funny, I guess, but I wouldn’t call his books funny. Maybe Vila-Matas? But not really. Those have a humorous tone at times, but are much more than that.

Looking through the list of everything published in 2015, I realized that most of us doing translations love to focus on the heavy, the important, the serious. Sure, there are things like The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, which seems funny in a goofy sit-com sort of way, and there are dozens of Dalkey backlist titles that contain “darkly funny” on the back cover. But looking at just the past year, I had a difficult time coming up with books that I would read when I just wanted to laugh and enjoy myself. (If I do this again in 2016, Volodine’s Bardo or Not Bardo will definitely be on here.) I’m probably being too strict with this—not duplicating books from earlier lists, leaving off story collections that aren’t entirely funny, trying to figure out what most people would find funny instead of sticking with my own sick sense of humor—but I was able to find four that I could include for various reasons. So here goes.

by Jón Gnarr, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Deep Vellum)

Not all that surprising given that Gnarr made his name as a comedian, but of the people I asked about this, no one actually mentioned this book. But I can guarantee it would be at the top of my daughter’s list.

She read this before meeting Jón and his lovely family when they were in Rochester last spring and couldn’t stop talking about it. Every post-it note in Chloë’s copy of the book marks a passage that she thought was funny.

There’s a lot of juvenile humor in here (I mean, it is about a troubled kid with a proclivity for goofing off), so if you’re not into that, you might focus more on the awful way in which Jón was treated, but still, the overall tone of the book is really fun and enjoyable.

by Máirtín O Cadhain, translated from the Irish by Alan Titley (Yale University Press)

This is my personal pick for the funniest translation of 2015. Taking place in an Irish graveyard, in which all of the buried never shut up and never stop insulting everyone, it’s a vocal tour-de-force that washes over you, rant by rant.

Don’t know if I am in the Pound grave, or the Fifteen Shilling grave? Fuck them anyway if they plonked me in the Ten Shilling plot after all the warnings I gave them. The morning I died I calls Patrick in from the kitchen, “I’m begging you Patrick, I’m begging you, put me in the Pound grave, the Pound grave! I know some of us are buried in the Ten Shilling grave, but all the same . . . “

That’s how it opens, with Caitriona Paudeen flipping her shit about how everyone treated her in life and death—a rant that goes on and on, despite being interrupted by any number of other dead souls. This book is hysterical and definitely worth reading. Also, I highly recommend to the translator read a few chapters.

As a side note, there’s a second translation of it coming out from Yale next year. I haven’t seen it yet, but from the description is sounds a bit more academic and footnoted. Should be interesting to compare the two . . .

by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, translated from the Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad (New Directions)

I don’t know too much about this book, but I saw Patrick Smith reference it in a tweet about how pleased he was to finally be reading a funny book. This was a book I had set aside, mostly because I hate the cover. Eyes are kind of gross when they’re disembodied, and dozens of them floating on a red background like a teenager’s photoshop project? Nope.

But after hearing about it from Patrick, I picked it up, and based on the few bits that I’ve read, it does have that sort of rambling, digressive humor that I really respond to. There are crazy section titles like “Wow! You Can’t Praise Enough This New Earthen Jar!” and “The Bad Fortunes of the Station, Lumber Market, and Red-Light District.”

I’m not finding any great quotes to illuminate the sort of joyous sense of humor that seems to underpin this book, but there is a quote on the back of the book from Wired (which is apparently a good source for information about literature?) referring to Yousufi’s “singularly elastic wit.” And Time Out New Delhi stated “Rarely have I encountered a book which made me laugh so freely.” So there’s that!

I’m sure I’ve skipped over a number of really funny, truly worthy books. So if you have any suggestions, please send them my way and maybe I’ll update this. I could use some more humor in my life, so I think I’m going on a personal quest to find more funny books to read . . .

BTBA 2015 Winners: Can Xue and Rocío Cerón!

Chad Post — Wed, 27 May 2015 18:50:00 +0000

The eighth annual Best Translated Book Awards were announced at BookExpo America this afternoon, with translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, taking home the award for fiction, and translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong, winning in poetry.

Thanks again to the support of Amazon.com��Ĵ�ý�s giving programs, the winning authors and translators will each receive $5,000.

��Ĵ�ý�I��Ĵ�ý�m so excited,��Ĵ�ý� Can Xue said when she was reached for a comment, ��Ĵ�ý�I think it��Ĵ�ý�s the most beautiful thing that has happened in my whole life. I always think of the BTBA as a very prestigious prize rewarding writers who have the great courage to achieve their literary ambitions.��Ĵ�ý�

According to the jury, Can Xue��Ĵ�ý�s (��Ĵ�ý�tsan shway��Ĵ�ý�) The Last Lover (published by Yale University Press) was the most radical and uncompromising of this year��Ĵ�ý�s finalists, pushing the novel form into bold new territory. Journeying through a dreamworld as strange yet disquietingly familiar as Kafka��Ĵ�ý�s Amerika, The Last Lover proves radiantly original. If Orientalists describe an East that exists only in the Western imagination, Can Xue describes its shadow, offering a beguiling dream of a Chinese West. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen��Ĵ�ý�s translation succeeds in crafting a powerful English voice for a writer of singular imagination and insight.

The judges also named three runners-up in fiction: Harlequin��Ĵ�ý�s Millions by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Stacey Knecht and published by Archipelago Books, for the wonderful lyricism of its winding sentences; Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and published by Coffee House Press, for the exceptional promise it demonstrates as a debut novel; and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions, for its vibrant characters and sweeping narrative power.

On the poetry side of things, David Shook, the co-founder and editorial director of Phoneme Media ��Ĵ�ý�congratulates translator Anna Rosenwong for her masterful translation of Rocío Cerón’s Diorama, our first book of poetry and one of the most fascinating and important books to have been published in Mexico this century. Phoneme Media is incredibly grateful for the support of the BTBA’s judges and organizers, to Three Percent and its indefatigable director Chad Post, to our fellow shortlisted publishing houses, translators, and authors, and to our readers around the world. Congratulations, Anna and Rocío, on receiving this much deserved award!��Ĵ�ý�

Past winners of the fiction award include: Seiobo There Below and Satantango, both by László Krasznahorkai (recent recipient of the Man Booker International Prize) and translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet and George Szirtes respectively; Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston; and, The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal. (Jansson and Teal are the only author and translator on this year��Ĵ�ý�s fiction shortlist who have previously won the award.)

In terms of the poetry award, past winners include: The Guest in the Wood by Elisa Biagini, translated from the Italian by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky; Wheel with a Single Spoke by Nichita Stănescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter; and Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander.

This year��Ĵ�ý�s fiction jury is made up of: George Carroll, North-North-West and Shelf Awareness; Monica Carter, Salonica; James Crossley, Island Books; Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading and Center for the Art of Translation; Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books; Katrine Øgaard Jensen, Asymptote; Madeleine LaRue, Music & Literature; Daniel Medin, American University of Paris, Cahiers Series, Quarterly Conversation, and the White Review; and Michael Orthofer, Complete Review.

The poetry jury includes: Biswamit Dwibedy, poet; Bill Martin, translator, critic, organizer of The Bridge; Dawn Lundy Martin, poet; Erica Mena, poet and translator; and Stefan Tobler, And Other Stories and translator.

For more information, visit the official Best Translated Book Award site and the official and follow the award on

Why This Book Should Win – Winter Mythologies and Abbotts by BTBA Judge James Crossley

Monica Carter — Fri, 01 May 2015 10:00:00 +0000

James Crossley is a bookseller at . He writes regularly for the store’s blog and for the website of the .

– Pierre Michon, Translated from the French by Ann Jefferson, France
Yale University Press

Winter Mythologies and Abbots was one of the first books I read as a BTBA judge, and it registered with me positively at the time. I didn’t expect it to stay with me so long, though, and slowly percolate its way to the upper reaches of my list of favorites.

The book was a originally a pair of books before translator Ann Jefferson and publisher Yale University Press got hold of them. The two parts are perfectly complementary in their new single volume, each a set of short fictions about obscure historical figures in Ireland and France. These monks and saints exist today as barely more than footnotes in ancient texts, but Pierre Michon treats their lives with the same significance as historians do kings and queens. More to the point, he bestows upon them the same level of attention that Tolstoy gives to Anna Karenina or Dickens to David Copperfield. Not that Michon is anything like as exhaustive as those authors were, but his feelings seem as intense. His imagination has made his characters real again.

It’s a further measure of his skills that they seem so despite how odd they remain. They are people whose lives are dedicated to faith and tradition, who see only the barest glimmers of rational enlightenment on the very distant horizon, and their motivations are often alien to modern eyes. Unlike most such characters in historical fiction, however, they’re not designed to allow self-congratulatory dismissal by contemporary readers. Their worldview is as complex and confused as ours, and paints as convincing a picture of medieval and pre-medieval times as I can imagine.

You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that the tack Michon’s taken here with his subject and his setting is not at all one to which I’m naturally sympathetic. Neither do I tend to favor fiction without some bravura to its prose, and that’s not WM&A’s style. It’s a quiet, modest work of carefully selected detail and incident that insinuates itself into the reader’s mind. I promise that this is not a recipe that guarantees notice by a BTBA judge who’s surveying half a thousand books in half a year, but it worked like magic in this case. I can’t recommend Winter Mythologies and Abbots highly enough.

Why This Book Should Win: Q&A with Annelise Finegan Wasmoen about The Last Lover

Monica Carter — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 09:01:00 +0000

Annelise Finegan Wasmoen is an editor and a literary translator. She is pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators and is Associate Series Editor of The Cahiers Series.

– Can Xue, Translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, China
Yale University Press
1. How did you discover Can Xue’s fiction? What led you to want to translate this book?

Prosaically enough, I discovered Can Xue’s writing in the same place that so many others have, in a classroom. I doubt there’s a survey of modern Chinese literature that doesn’t include her short story ��Ĵ�ý�Hut on the Mountain.��Ĵ�ý� It was immediately clear she was working at a level of experimentation that was on a different plane than her contemporaries, pushing the boundaries of fiction toward something else entirely.

With The Last Lover, it was less a matter of being led to translate the book than leaping at the opportunity to do so. I met Can Xue through Jonathan Brent, then editorial director of Yale University Press, where I worked as an assistant editor in 2007��Ĵ�ý�08; he shared a sample chapter of my translation with the author and the rest went smoothly enough. What kept me translating was the incredible intricacy of the text: the novel yields new insights even after a dozen readings.

2. Anything that a new reader of Can Xue should know before diving in?

When you asked me to speak with your Contemporary World Literature class earlier this spring, one of the students asked the perfect question: is it better to try to make sense of The Last Lover while reading it, or to wait until the end? Wait to the end, if you can. Can Xue’s style of writing tends to resist immediate attempts at sense-making, but to read her fiction carefully, especially in the longer form of a novel, is to realize that there are intricate patterns and motifs woven through the text.

To the extent that there is an overarching narrative, The Last Lover begins in the West and by its end several characters have journeyed to the East, whether in dreams or in person. The primary setting is an unspecified Country A, which some readers have taken to indicate a generalized Occident, and others to be an image of America. But it’s America in the sense of Kafka’s Amerika, where the Statue of Liberty holds a sword. You can see how this might be a sort of commentary. The characters have names drawn from many different languages and cultures, with reversals of first and last names as well. The novel features three central couples��Ĵ�ý�Joe and Maria (who have a son, Daniel), Vincent and Lisa, Reagan and Ida��Ĵ�ý�with each chapter focusing on one of these figures.

A self-reflexive theme of reading follows the character Joe, who fails to separate the world of fiction from the world that surrounds him. Here’s a passage from the book about Joe’s reading:

The next day Joe took off from work. He began reading a book with only one page. The book was clothbound, with a drawing of a tall pine tree on the cover. Inside there was a single thick sheet of paper. This sheet could be unfolded to the length of the desk. The picture on the cover appeared to be of an anthill. The periphery of the anthill was densely written over with a miniature text, visible only under a magnifying glass. And once Joe looked with the glass, he discovered that he didn��Ĵ�ý�t recognize a single word.

Then the book starts flapping around the room, then the room starts shaking, then there is an invasion of doves, etc.

The theme of love, too, pervades the novel, although in many ways The Last Lover explores how people are constantly moving away from each other through space and time, both real and imagined. As the distance between the book��Ĵ�ý�s central couples increases, their communication deepens. These forms of communication from afar seem to echo the novel’s central parable about reading.

Finally, there is an interpolation of national history, namely the recurring reference to the 1930s Long March. Although technically the Long March was a very long tactical retreat, it allowed for the consolidation of the Communist Party at Yan’an; it began as a historical event and became a myth of national origins. Within the novel, several of the characters undergo an inner long march, which takes place in the middle of the night, in a not-quite-dream-state, and is associated with the characters Lisa and Maria. Luding Bridge, the site of a central battle during the Long March, also appears at several key moments.

Of course it’s up to the reader to parse and process these various elements��Ĵ�ý�the journey from West to East, the theme of love and communication at a distance, the personal long march��Ĵ�ý�but I hope that outlining them in this way might give hope to someone approaching Can Xue’s fiction for the first time.

For a reader who prefers a naturalizing or domesticating style, the translation might be difficult. Can Xue refers to her writing as having an inner mechanism, which sounds mysterious, but there is an associative logic that runs through all of her fiction. Since it was important to follow this associative logic that relates certain words or images to each other, I chose a translation style that kept as much consistency as possible, retaining correlations instead of attempting to achieve a natural flow. This was in the service of leaving the reader in English with the same interpretative leeway as the reader of the original, which is a risky sort of thing. This was the first novel I translated, and in other translations I’ve gone in the other direction, but this specific text seemed to call for an extreme level of fidelity: translate everything; explain nothing.

For example, in the fourth chapter, there is a ��Ĵ�ý�so-called greenhouse,��Ĵ�ý� a large empty room with small windows and dim lighting. There are earthen bowls arrayed on the ground with coarse sand and seeds in them. The gardener holds a seed and says, ��Ĵ�ý�Look, it��Ĵ�ý�s already burst open, but the shoots inside can��Ĵ�ý�t get out. All the seeds here are in the same condition. The flowers open inside of dreams. … the seeds still keep this shape, neither sprouting nor decaying.��Ĵ�ý� The flowers that bloom from these seeds appear at other places in the novel: the character Lisa looks at a tapestry and ��Ĵ�ý�there floated up in her mind the red sun of an early morning in the gambling city, where sprouting seeds, exhausted from a long night of breaking through, struggled out.��Ĵ�ý� There is a family whose rosebushes bloom year-round, become electrified, and are uprooted by the son, whom his father has dreamed of as a body with a rose for its head. These examples are scattered across the book, available for excavation, but might be lost in the translation if any of the individual elements were disrupted: the bowls, the seeds, the flowers.

3. The Last Lover is the second novel by Can Xue to appear in English. Unlike , which appeared in English in 2009 but actually dates to 1988, it’s a fairly recent work (2005). How would you distinguish her recent books from the earlier ones? In what ways has her writing changed over the course of her career?

Can Xue is perhaps best known for her mastery of the short story: condensed meditations on a single theme, an expanded metaphor, an unnerving turn of events, a strange interaction. In recent years she has been undertaking more novel-length projects, which, remarkably, maintain the same sort of intensity but at an exponential degree of complexity. To me, it seems that the experiments with longer forms mark a key development in her approach to writing.

4. Could you point out one of your favorite passages in The Last Lover, and tell us what you like about (translating) it?

Definitely the last chapter. Toward the end of the novel (spoilers), the character Joe disappears into the world of his stories and his wife discovers this world embodied in a forest of books. As I mentioned before, much of the novel treats of separation. Here, there is a moment of joy in rediscovering family bonds, worked across the literalized metaphor of the forest of books.

That night Maria went to the study because she couldn��Ĵ�ý�t sleep. Although she hadn��Ĵ�ý�t turned on the light, she could see that Joe��Ĵ�ý�s bookcases had turned into a dark forest of books. The books had grown large, one book set next to another vertically on the floor, the pages of the books opening and closing.

[…]

Maria touched the enormous book pages with a shaking finger. She touched one after another of the letters protruding from the pages, and those letters jumped slightly, giving off electricity. Suddenly she comprehended the book��Ĵ�ý�s meaning. The book told of an ancient, deserted beach. Someone climbed onto the bank from the sea. Sea birds cried ominously in the air. ��Ĵ�ý�That man is Joe,��Ĵ�ý� Maria spoke quietly. Then her finger touched the word ��Ĵ�ý�Joe.��Ĵ�ý� ��Ĵ�ý�Joe, is it you?��Ĵ�ý� she asked.

[…]

Over several decades of uninterrupted reading, her Joe had created this forest. And he hadn��Ĵ�ý�t removed her from it. Once she entered, she blended into this place. In the su su rustling sound made by the pages, a world of writing appeared in her mind. She realized that for many years everything she��Ĵ�ý�d woven was this writing. So familiar, so pleasing��Ĵ�ý�was this happiness? She began to walk from one book to another. Dry leaves made noise under her feet; her feet touched a few small stones; she even heard the song of a nightingale. It was inside the pages of the largest book, singing and then pausing.

There was a dim light in the forest of books, but when Maria looked up she couldn��Ĵ�ý�t see the sky. Was there even a sky? There were grass, stones, a path, and she heard water flowing from a spring. But the air was filled with the fine smell of old books. This was Joe��Ĵ�ý�s story. This story belonged to her, forever. Maria��Ĵ�ý�s heart was full of gratitude. She pricked her ears, awaiting the nightingale��Ĵ�ý�s singing again.

She waited till it sang, but it wasn��Ĵ�ý�t one call, it was many, many calls. One rising as another fell.

The very close of the novel turns quite dark again, ending on an intensely powerful image.

A Few Good Reviews

Chad Post — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Over the past few days, a few great reviews for Open Letter authors popped up online, all of which are worth sharing and reading.

First up is P.T. Smith’s of Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson’s translated from the Icelandic by Helga Soffía Einarsdóttir:

As a book of drinking, endless binges of drinking, and of constant comedy, The Last Days of My Mother is a perfect book to drink to, reminding you of the shame that follows the pleasure, but comfortably letting you know that you aren��Ĵ�ý�t drowning like the protagonists. In the opening pages, Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson��Ĵ�ý�s two protagonists, Mother/Eva and son/Trooper, do not have the same self-censorship that most of us have, and their adventure is all the better for it. Neither seems to manage happiness, but with Eva dying, Trooper sets himself the goal ��Ĵ�ý�to make Mother happy during the last days of her life.��Ĵ�ý� [. . .]

Their efforts only resemble plans because for the vast majority of the novel, they are in varying stages of drinking, drunk, very drunk, stoned, and planning their next drink. Throughout it all, there is dark, brutal comedy, hysterically playful comedy, and immediate switches to the serious, the poignant, without pain from whiplash. The emotional, the ongoing sadness of loss, of dead hopes, isn��Ĵ�ý�t a contradiction to humor; instead they exist together, and the closer they come, the less Eve and Trooper struggle. Comedy, with all its nuances, is sometimes impossible to communicate between two people who speak the same language, so translator Helga Soffía Einarsdóttir keeping it so alive proves great skill. Last Days is a book funny enough that my housemates laughed at my laughter while otherwise quietly reading, without reading a word.

Drinking novels are familiar, death of a family member novels are familiar, dark comedies, familiar, but Last Days brings something new: a mother and son with absolutely zero boundaries between each other.

Sticking with Full Stop, there about Can Xue’s latest novel, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen:

The Last Lover is not an easy read. But it is incandescent and engrossing if you are okay with losing your sense of self for a few hours. Here is how I experienced it.

Hour one: I sit in a coffee shop with a paperback copy and a cup of ginger tea. The prose is dense, peculiar. The characters are given to sudden declarations.

Hour two: I am astonished to realize that I have only read less than fifty pages.

Hour three: My head hurts. I feel like I have been translating. I have stopped tweeting.

Hour four: I succumb to the book. I let it carry me. My cup is empty. I do not question anything that happens in the novel: wolfish faces; floating couples; inexplicable transformations; the motif of heads separating from bodies and hovering there, as if still connected. Nor do I question the characters��Ĵ�ý� reactions, who take all of these surreal developments gamely, as they must, as we accept the eerie faces we sometimes see in the periphery of our vision.

Hour five: I sit up and feel as though I have emerged from dreaming. I look around myself surreptitiously, suspicious that the world has flipped over while I was reading. It seems impossible that I could crawl so deep within this novel and have everything remain the same. I feel betrayed. There is a scene in The Last Lover in which the characters enter a gambling city, which is both under- and aboveground. The tunnels underground are full of smoke, which all the residents of the gambling city are used to breathing. Where is my smoke? Where are my slot machines?

And over at “Numero Cinq,“http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2014/08/04/the-decomposition-of-continuous-movement-review-of-juan-jose-saers-la-grande-richard-farrell/ Richard Farell writes up Juan José Saer’s translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph:

Consider hospitality. Imagine, say, a cookout, on a Sunday afternoon, with old friends gathered around a pool deck. Meat sizzles on the grill. It is autumn, but a last gasp of summer heats the day and warms the water. The party��Ĵ�ý�s host, Willi Gutiérrez��Ĵ�ý�a screenwriter, a sophisticated man of letters��Ĵ�ý�has been living abroad in Europe for the last thirty years and has recently returned to his native Argentina. Decades have passed since many of the guests assembled here have broken bread together. The convivial atmosphere of the party crackles with laughter, with clanging wine glasses, and with stories. But just beneath that welcoming surface hides a mystery, swirling down like a river, faster and deeper as the party courses above. This mystery is one of ontology, of the deep, mystical, convoluted experience that is life, with all its secrets, its intrigue, its tragedies and its triumphs. At the very bottom, on the murky river floor where memory resides, where so much has been lost to time��Ĵ�ý�betrayals, desires, the forgotten war, love, passions��Ĵ�ý�here we find the source material for Juan José Saer��Ĵ�ý�s La Grande. Saer reassembles the fragments. He reconstructs experience through memory, where nothing is ever quite what it appears, and yet where everything that appears is luminescent, like gold flakes panned from the silt, polished, crafted and forged into a ring.

In La Grande, Saer masterfully creates a fictional world at once brimming with life, detail, and imagery. Recursive themes appear, connect, and eventually assemble into a story. For nearly 500 pages, La Grande patterns many different but deeply connected narratives across those thirty years, two continents and dozens of characters. The novel opens as Gutierréz leads Nula on a walk along the Parana River, toward a café in the countryside. Saer always evokes place through movement and memory, and as they walk, the young wine merchant becomes mesmerized by his older friend, who has reentered this world��Ĵ�ý�abandoned for thirty years��Ĵ�ý�as if no time has passed at all. Nula wants to understand Gutiérrez. Who is he? Why did he leave? Why has he returned? Saer may not directly answer these questions, but they constitute the main impulse of the novel. [. . .]

Flannery O��Ĵ�ý�Connor once remarked that a good story resists paraphrase. La Grande isn��Ĵ�ý�t about parties, wine sales, sex or even ultimately about Argentine history. And yet it contains all of these and so much more. The experience, the joy, of reading this book comes from an appreciation of Saer��Ĵ�ý�s ability to keep these various pieces in motion. Saer-as-maestro teases apart story lines, only to carefully reconnect them hundreds of pages later, so that, by novel��Ĵ�ý�s end, when the various actors have gathered at the party in Gutiérrez��Ĵ�ý�s home, ��Ĵ�ý�even the things that are familiar to us are unfamiliar, if only because we��Ĵ�ý�ve allowed ourselves to forget the mysterious things about them.��Ĵ�ý� The mundane becomes strange, significant, filled with meaning, so that each story, each character, each plot step even, appears consequential. Nothing is ever wasted.

Latest Review: "Masters and Servants" by Pierre Michon

Kaija Straumanis — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 14:30:00 +0000

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on Masters and Servants by Pierre Michon, translated (illustrated, and with an introduction) by Wyatt Mason, and out from Yale University Press.

When’s the last time you read a book, and were so moved or inspired by what you read that you immediately hotfoot it to the closest bookstore to buy up all the rest of said author’s works? I, truly, can’t remember. Maybe Patrick Süskind’s works back in 2005? (By which logic, does that mean I’ve been only moderately inspired by authors I’ve read for almost the past 10 years? Yikes . . .)

Anyway, Tiffany (who, among many other things, runs a food and book blog, , and who should come to Rochester post-haste and make for me) experienced just that after reading Michon’s work, something that in its own right is inspiring to once again contemplate, discover, and stock up on those authors whose works have moved you.

Here’s the beginning of her review:

We have all observed and appreciated art. However, when we experience art, it is generally in a bubble of our own experiences and preferences. More often than not, we may know the artist only in name and that he or she is noteworthy leading to the required appreciation. It is rare that we have knowledge of how the artists’ life experiences led to their ultimate creations and masterpieces. We know nothing of the subjects, the driving forces that resulted in the creation of the piece, nor the inner turmoil the artists endured to create their works.

Masters and Servants by Pierre Michon is an incredibly special literary work in that it truly does bring art to life. The work consists of five short stories focusing on the subjects of masterpieces and the artists��Ĵ�ý� relationships with the subjects of those pieces. Michon��Ĵ�ý�s grasp of language and the art of storytelling is equal to the artistic ability of the artists he explores in Masters and Servants. These artists include Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Antoine Watteau, Claude Lorrain, and Lorentino.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Masters and Servants

Kaija Straumanis — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 14:30:00 +0000

We have all observed and appreciated art. However, when we experience art, it is generally in a bubble of our own experiences and preferences. More often than not, we may know the artist only in name and that he or she is noteworthy leading to the required appreciation. It is rare that we have knowledge of how the artists’ life experiences led to their ultimate creations and masterpieces. We know nothing of the subjects, the driving forces that resulted in the creation of the piece, nor the inner turmoil the artists endured to create their works.

Masters and Servants by Pierre Michon is an incredibly special literary work in that it truly does bring art to life. The work consists of five short stories focusing on the subjects of masterpieces and the artists��Ĵ�ý� relationships with the subjects of those pieces. Michon��Ĵ�ý�s grasp of language and the art of storytelling is equal to the artistic ability of the artists he explores in Masters and Servants. These artists include Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Antoine Watteau, Claude Lorrain, and Lorentino.

In the first of five short stories, Michon provides the intimate details of Joseph Roulin��Ĵ�ý�s life as it shortly overlapped with van Gogh��Ĵ�ý�s until Joseph decides to sell one of his van Gough��Ĵ�ý�s pieces. Michon dives into each and every minute detail of Joseph��Ĵ�ý�s life��Ĵ�ý�his job, political views, excessive drinking, reaction to van Gogh��Ĵ�ý�s death, and inability to appreciate why van Gogh��Ĵ�ý�s art reached the masterpiece level. Each and every word is carefully calculated like each line an artist commits to the canvas. The prose fluctuates between time and space without notice as the art that is being described. This is evidence in the following excerpt:

I want it to bear his name; so that words and the rhythms of language instantly endorse the great peacoat and hat of the post office; so that words and their rhythms grow old in Marseille and remember Arles; so that words end up sprouting beards; they��Ĵ�ý�ll appear in Prussian blue; they��Ĵ�ý�ll be alcoholic and republican; they won��Ĵ�ý�t make sense of one drop of the paintings; but with some luck, or by kidnapping, perhaps words will once again become a painting; they��Ĵ�ý�ll be muzhik or boyar as the spirit moves me��Ĵ�ý�and completely arbitrary, as usual��Ĵ�ý�but will come visibly to light, manifest, and die.

The voice of Masters and Servants is synonymous with the narrator of Wes Anderson films. The narrator is neither neutral nor impartial because his/her agenda is to paint a specific image and induce a calculated perception of the artists and their subjects. The best descriptor I could find for the narrator��Ĵ�ý�s voice was that of a personification of a manifesto; one whose goal is to remind use that artists are people and art does not stand on its own without the artist lest we forget the hardships, confusions, and externalities that resulted in our beloved masterpieces. For example,

Van Gogh��Ĵ�ý�who never thought as far as Rome, who was too modest or barbaric to think that far��Ĵ�ý�van Gogh had thought about Marseille throughout his life; I don��Ĵ�ý�t know what novel had made him imagine it to be some sort of artists��Ĵ�ý� Mecca, as he��Ĵ�ý�s said, but he was surely the only artist to think it so, all because the paint Monticelli had lived and died there��Ĵ�ý�done in by arrogance, misery, and absinthe, a parinter he ranked as highly as Rembrandt, Rubens, Delacroix��Ĵ�ý�Monticelli whose painting I wouldn��Ĵ�ý�t know how to judge but that they tell me aren��Ĵ�ý�t so ugly . . . So van Gogh wanted to go to Marseille with Gauguin . . . who knows if a rich van Gogh wouldn��Ĵ�ý�t have been as elegant as Manet, and just as smitten with etiquette. Due has never made it there: and, postmortem, he delegated Roulin.

Each of the remaining four short stories are equally delightful and enlightening in content and language. I was so moved by this work, I promptly biked to the bookstore to pick up the remaining Michon works available in English, which, as it turns out, are all part of the Yale University Press Margellos Series.