translation
“Unterstadt” is valuable, and not only because it memorably excavates a repressed episode in Croatian history. The novel also has considerable relevance, given the savagery besieging the innocent in today’s conflagrations.
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A translator must meet a compelling need — to reinvent Franz Kafka’s voice in an English that resounds in the present moment.
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The cumulative effect over the course of Jhumpa Lahiri’s book sharpens our view of what the imperfect art of translation can, in fact, do.
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Ludwig Hohl belongs in the line of such lucidly contentious thinkers as Karl Kraus, Pascal, and Lichtenberg, commentators whose writing oscillates between the traditions of literature and philosophy.
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The volume’s spirited imagination is strong enough to compensate for flaws in its translation.
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There is enough candor and humor, along with a handful of bracingly moody characters, to make Mariana Leky’s vision of perpetual love compelling.
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“Why read Zola now? Leaving aside sheer enjoyment of his narrative art, I’d say: because his representation of society’s impact on the individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be a human being in the modern world.”
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A supple, evocative novel that meditates on family and loss and art.
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Jonas Hassen Khemiri does little in The Family Clause to put his own spin on the usual domestic showdown of repression versus dreams of liberation.
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For each of these major, prize-honored writers — Siegfried Lenz and Walter Kempowski– birth = destiny = art.
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