Tag Archives: literary review
Unlived Lives in Natalia Ginzburg’s “Valentino” and “Sagittarius,” Translated from Italian by Avril Bardoni
By Eric Gudas One refers, as a commonplace, to “the unlived life”; but fiction excels at dramatizing people’s myriad unlived lives. Natalia Ginzburg’s fiction links stifled hopes and ambitions with suppressed speech. The narrators of Ginzburg’s Valentino and Sagittarius: Two Novellas (1957), which New York Review Books Classics has just reissued in Avril Bardoni’s decades-old […]
Halcyon Days: Adrien Goetz’s “Villa of Delirium,” translated from French by Natasha Lehrer
The novel falls within the greater readiness in French culture to reckon with the nation’s anti-Semitic past than its colonialism.
The Lying Life of Narrators
It seems hardly coincidental that Ferrante, whose own “true” identity has been the object of intense scrutiny and speculation, chooses to underscore the act of crafting a fiction about oneself.
Anna Karenina, Recomposed: Carmen Boullosa’s “The Book of Anna,” translated from Spanish by Samantha Schnee
The Book of Anna hinges on a paradoxical fantasy: rescuing Anna Karenina from Tolstoy.
Translators on Books that Should Be Translated: Simona Baldelli’s “Evelina e le fate” (Evelina and the Fairies)
Baldelli’s inventiveness and skillful stylistic prowess are already noticeable in Evelina e le fate, with its vivid language adhering to a world of objects in which the characters come alive through a meddling of voices, each with its own substantive body