Author Archives: lschell
THE LIFE OF HIS OTHER: Ricardo Piglia’s THE DIARIES OF EMILIO RENZI. FORMATIVE YEARS, TRANSLATED BY ROBERT CROLL
Reviewed by Peter Hegarty Argentinian writer Ricardo Emilio Piglia Renzi (1940 – 2017) had two literary identities. Ricardo Piglia wrote operas, screenplays, stories and detective fiction. In the English-speaking world he is probably best-known for Money to Burn (1997), a non-fiction novel inspired, if that is the word, by the violent robbery of a security […]
“Write, Don’t Think”: Jon Fosse’s Boathouse, translated by May-Brit Akerholt
Reviewed by David Smith In the late 1980s, around the time he wrote Boathouse, Jon Fosse was a teacher at the Creative Writing Academy in Bergen, Norway. (One of his students was a nineteen-year-old Karl Ove Knausgaard, as related in book 5 of My Struggle.) “When I was a teacher,” Fosse has said, “I would […]
Crossing Over and Beyond: Distant Light by Antonio Moresco Translated by Richard Dixon
Reviewed by Stiliana Milkova “I have come here to disappear, in this desolate and abandoned village where I’m the sole inhabitant” reads the enigmatic opening line of Antonio Moresco’s novel Distant Light, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon. Distant Light is a beguiling tale narrated by a man who lives alone in the mountains […]
Catharsis, Grief, and the Beauty of Nature: Less Like a Dove By Agi Mishol, Translated by Joanna Chen
Reviewed by Gwen Ackerman Agi Mishol is as one of Israel’s most beloved poets. The recipient of numerous awards including the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize, the Yehuda Amichai Prize for Hebrew Poetry, and the Lerici-Pea Prize in Italy, she has taught in programs and schools throughout Israel. Her work has been translated into several languages, […]
The Stunted Spruce: Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds, translated by Michael Barnes and Torbjørn Støverud
Reviewed by David Smith Decades after his passing, the prominence of Tarjei Vesaas in Norwegian letters is difficult to overstate. As Dag Solstad puts it, “There are few readers who do not count at least one book by Tarjei Vesaas as one of their truly great reading experiences.”[i] In the English-speaking world, however, Vesaas has […]
‘AFTER THE OLYMPICS WE’LL GET RUTHLESS’: Berlin 1936 by Oliver Hilmes, translated by Jefferson Chase
Reviewed by Peter Hegarty Translator Jefferson Chase would have found Oliver Hilmes’s Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August pleasantly familiar. A resident of Berlin, he walks the same streets as Hilmes’s characters. He knows their haunts, the places where they lived, caroused, suffered. He can easily visit the austerely beautiful Olympic stadium on which the […]
Cruel Imaginations: The Stories of Mariana Enriquez and Silvina Ocampo
Reviewed by Rebecca DeWald At the Edinburgh International Book Festival last summer, I heard Mariana Enriquez read from her short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire, the first English translation of her work, by Megan McDowell. Twice, in fact: At the official reading, and at a more informal evening event with readings and […]
Writing about war in the language of peace: Croatian War Nocturnal by Spomenka Štimec, translated by Sebastian Schulman
Reviewed by Ellen Cassedy To read Spomenka Štimec’s compelling new work of autobiographical fiction, Croatian War Nocturnal, is to be struck by multiple ironies. First, it’s heartbreaking that this gripping account of the everyday traumas of war has been written in, of all languages, Esperanto – the language invented to promote world peace. And second, […]
I WAS HOPING YOU’D TELL ME WHO I AM: ESHKOL NEVO’S THREE FLOORS UP TRANSLATED BY SONDRA SILVERSTON
Reviewed by Marcela Sulak The title of Eshkol Nevo’s most recent book, Three Floors Up, refers to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the unconscious, which Freud likened to three floors of a mansion: the id, the ego, and the superego. The three protagonists of the three-part novel, each of whom lives on a different floor of […]
Trauma Ballads: Blume Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories, translated by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Reviewed by Daniel Kennedy “I am a housewife, a wife, a mother, a grandmother—and a Yiddish writer. I write my stories in Yiddish. [. . . ] Because I speak Yiddish, think in Yiddish. My father and mother, my sisters and brothers, my murdered people seek revenge in Yiddish.” (215) There was a time when […]
Transparent Hours: Eunice Odio’s Territory of Dawn. Selected Poems, Translated by Keith Ekiss, Sonia P. Ticas, and Mauricio Espinoza
Reviewed by Jessica Sequeira It seems a terrible irony: a poet who primarily dedicated her work to a Beloved, one whose verses seem written with joy and melancholy rather than malice, is born with a surname that means hate. But no, already it’s a mistake to start from signification. Let’s think into this a different […]
Glossing a Vanished World: S. An-sky’s Pioneers, Translated by Rose Waldman
Reviewed by Ellen Cassedy On a dark afternoon in the late 19th century, a lurching vehicle rounds the bend into a small Eastern European town: “A large, ungainly coach, a sort of Noah’s ark stuffed with passengers, lumbered slowly and with difficulty down the wide, muddy roads of the town of Miloslavka” (23). Out of […]
Sugar castles: I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio, translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas
Reviewed by Jessica Sequeira The poems of Uruguayan writer Marosa di Giorgio (1932 – 2004) are luscious, dark and gorgeous — but they also leave the reader with a sickly taste, an effect similar to that following the rapid consumption of a bag of sticky sweets, gulped down one after another while in thrall to […]
Scattered Ashes: August by Romina Paula, translated by Jennifer Croft
Reviewed by Peter Hegarty In southern Argentina, where Paula sets most of the novel, August is bright and cold, and colder still in Esquel, the Andean mountain town to which the protagonist, Emilia, returns for the scattering of the ashes of her best friend, Andrea. The novel takes the form of an extended letter to […]
Hothouse Flower: Olvido García Valdés’s And We Were All Alive, translated by Catherine Hammond
Reviewed by Jessica Sequeira “There were those who compared her to Santa Teresa, others who said she was too serious, even sullen, and people who swore her pride was chilling to those who met her,” wrote Roberto Bolaño of Olvido García Valdés. When he read her work, however, it “dazzled [him] the way that only […]