Quarterly Conversation #11
The new issue of is now available, and full of interesting pieces including reviews of Lydie Salvayre’s , Dorothea Dieckmann’s (which won our inaugural Best Translation of 2007 award), and Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s . There’s also a longer essay by François Monti on the fascinating and strange fiction of .
A really cool feature is the list in which each of the issue’s contributors selects one overrated and one underrated book. Interesting in and of itself, but really, I only got as far as this entry, which made me giddy with anticipation:
Underrated: Doctor Pasavento by Enrique Vila-Matas
Maybe it’s problematic to consider an award-winning book under-rated, but quite a few reviewers of Enrique Vila-Matas’s Doctor Pasavento complained that it was just the same book as the previous one, and the one before. Surface-reading at its worst: if Doctor Pasavento, the third volume of Vila-Matas’s metaliterary trilogy, indeed reiterates things that were said in Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady, it does so with much more depth, addressing a very different theme: the difficulty of being nobody. It is the pinnacle of Vila-Matas’s body of work thus far, and it should appeal to readers of Sebald and Walser.
I really hope New Directions publishes this sometime soon . . .
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