We’re having the party at at 145 Plymouth St. in Brooklyn. (To get there take the F train to York Street, the first stop in Brooklyn.)

Francisco Goldman will be hosting the event, and will announce the fiction and poetry winners for 2008. (The complete list of finalists is below.) We’ll also have appetizers and drinks . . .

If you think you’re going to make it, please RSVP either at the or by e-mailing me at chad.post at rochester dot edu. (You don’t need to RSVP to get in, but we’d really like to have some idea of how many people will be there . . . This is going to be a lot of fun.)

Fiction Finalists:

Tranquility by Attila Bartis
translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein
(Archipelago)

2666 by Roberto Bolaño
translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
(New Directions)

Voice Over by Céline Curiol
translated from the French by Sam Richard
(Seven Stories)

The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans
translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke
(Overlook)

Yalo by Elias Khoury
translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux
(Archipelago)

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
(New Directions)

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge
translated from the French by Richard Greeman
(New York Review Books)

Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra
translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis
(Melville House)

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg
(New York Review Books)

Poetry Finalists:

Essential Poems and Writings by Robert Desnos
translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, Terry Hale, Bill Zavatsky, Martin Sorrell, Jonathan Eburne, Katherine Connelly, Patricia Terry, and Paul Auster
(Black Widow)

You Are the Business by Caroline Dubois
translated from the French by Cole Swensen
(Burning Deck)

As It Turned Out by Dmitry Golynko
translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebecca Bella, and Simona Schneider
(Ugly Duckling)

For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide
translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu
(New Directions)

Poems of A.O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud
translated from the French by Ron Padgett & Bill Zavatsky
(Black Widow)

Night Wraps the Sky by Vladimir Mayakovsky
translated from the Russian by Katya Apekina, Val Vinokur, and Matvei Yankelevich, and edited by Michael Almereyda
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A Different Practice by Fredrik Nyberg
translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida
(Ugly Duckling)

EyeSeas by Raymond Queneau
translated from the French by Daniela Hurezanu and Stephen Kessler
(Black Widow)

Peregrinary by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki
translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston
(Zephyr)

Eternal Enemies by Adam Zagajewski
translated from the polish by Clare Cavanagh
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Many thanks to all the publishers who sent us copies of the books, to everyone who’s written about this award or read any of the overviews we’ve written, and to all of the panelists (who are listed in detail below).

So here goes:

• by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein (Archipelago) (Overview)

• by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) (Overview)

• by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions) (Overview)

• by Céline Curiol, translated from the French by Sam Richard (Seven Stories) (Overview)

• by Willem Frederik Hermans, translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke (Overlook) (Overview)

• by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux (Archipelago) (Overview)

• by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions) (Overview)

• by Victor Serge, translated from the French by Richard Greeman (New York Review Books) (Overview)

• by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis (Melville House) (Overview)

• by Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (New York Review Books) (Overview)

At the February 19th event at Melville House Books—which will be hosted by Francisco Goldman—we’ll announce the two runners-up and the winner for both the poetry and fiction categories. And you’re all invited, so hopefully we’ll see you there . . .

This year’s panelists included Monica Carter, bookseller at and editor of ; Steve Dolph, editor of ; Scott Esposito, editor of and ; Brandon Kennedy, bookseller at ; Michael Orthofer, editor of the and ; Chad W. Post, director of and ; E.J. Van Lanen, senior editor of Open Letter Books and Three Percent; and Jeff Waxman, bookseller at the and editor of .

UPDATE: To view or download the official press release, click here.

• by Robert Desnos, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, Terry Hale, Bill Zavatsky, Martin Sorrell, Jonathan Eburne, Katherine Connelly, Patricia Terry, and Paul Auster (Black Widow)

• by Caroline Dubois, translated from the French by Cole Swensen (Burning Deck)

• by Dmitry Golynko, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebecca Bella, and Simona Schneider (Ugly Duckling)

• by Takashi Hiraide, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu (New Directions)

• by Valery Larbaud, translated from the French by Ron Padgett and Bill Zavatsky (Black Widow)

• by Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated from the Russian by Katya Apekina, Val Vinokur, and Matvei Yankelevich, and edited by Michael Almereyda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

• by Fredrik Nyberg, translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida (Ugly Duckling)

• by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Daniela Hurezanu and Stephen Kessler (Black Widow)

• by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Zephyr)

• by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

UPDATE: To view or download the official press release, click here.

edited by Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller is one of the most comprehensive books of the year. Here’s the opening from Margarita Shalina’s great review:

It is difficult to get beyond the novelty inherent in the New European Poets project. Its remarkable scope, breadth and depth show-cases 290 poets representing 45 nations, all bridged by nearly 200 translators and directed by 24 regional editors. Every contributing poet’s first collection was published in or after 1970. The motivation behind the project is two-fold, reintroduce and reengage American readers with European poetry and express how the borders of Europe have been redrawn in recent decades there by altering its regional identities along with its identity as a whole. And what is contemporary Europe anyway?

This is a mammoth book, and a necessary one for anyone interested in contemporary European poetry.

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is edited and translated by Niloufar Talebi, and features a range of contemporary Iranian poetry. Peter Conners reviewed this for us and had this to say:

After reading her introduction and the first few sections of Belonging, I realized that Talebi had accomplished perhaps the greatest service that a translator of Iranian poetry for American audiences can provide: she made the Iranian poetic landscape feel familiar. Not only familiar, but modern, full of laughter, rich with wonder, completely joyful and terrible and worthy of revisiting multiple times. Without being able to compare it to the original Persian, I can only say that the poetry in Talebi’s translations is lucid, rich with music, and highly accessible.

In addition to this anthology, it’s worth checking out Niloufar’s as well. She’s doing a lot of great things for Persian literature as a whole, and the blend of text and performance is unique and very compelling. (In fact, if you happen to be in San Francisco next week, you should check out the that the Translation Project is putting on.)

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Part of the NEA’s International Exchange program, is an ambitious undertaking. Edited by Evgeny Bunimovich and Jim Kates, it features forty-four Russian poets, all born after 1945. It also features dozens of great Russian translators as well.

(As a sidenote, one of the books I’m looking forward to in 2009 is Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction, another NEA project that Dalkey is publishing. Edited by Alvaro Uribe and Olivia Sears, this looks like a great round-up of the current literary scene in Mexico.)

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Edited and translated by David Hinton, is another book that, if for nothing else, deserves some praise for its enormous scope:

With this groundbreaking collection, translated and edited by the renowned poet and translator David Hinton, a new generation will be introduced to the work that riveted Ezra Pound and transformed modern poetry. The Chinese poetic tradition is the largest and longest continuous tradition in world literature, and this rich and far-reaching anthology of nearly five hundred poems provides a comprehensive account of its first three millennia (1500 BCE to 1200 CE), the period during which virtually all its landmark developments took place. Unlike earlier anthologies of Chinese poetry, Hinton’s book focuses on a relatively small number of poets, providing selections that are large enough to re-create each as a fully realized and unique voice. New introductions to each poet’s work provide a readable history, told for the first time as a series of poetic innovations forged by a series of master poets. From the classic texts of Chinese philosophy to intensely personal lyrics, from love poems to startling and strange perspectives on nature, Hinton has collected an entire world of beauty and insight. And in his eye-opening translations, these ancient poems feel remarkably fresh and contemporary, presenting a literature both radically new and entirely resonant.

But for now, I thought that before announcing the finalists for fiction and poetry (and yes, I do know what they are, but that post won’t go live until tomorrow morning . . .), I’d take a moment to highlight some of the more interesting university presses and the translations they published this year.

At the top of the list has to be Columbia University Press. There’s no other university press in the country doing as many interesting Asian works in translation as Columbia. (Not to mention the fact that their books are handsomely designed, and paperback editions of several — such as I Love Dollars — have been picked up by very prestigious presses, like Penguin.)

The two big books that came out this year as part of the series (both of which could’ve easily made our longlist) are Wang Anyi’s and Ch’oe Yun’s

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Chinese author Wang Anyi was actually a book this year, and got some very nice coverage when it came out this summer. Here’s a description from an article by

Spanning forty odd years from 1945 to 1986, the novel is tripartite. Book I is set in the glittery city of Shanghai during the latter half of the 1940s. Wang Qiyao, a glamorous girl from a lowly family who dreamed of becoming a movie star in her school days, takes third place in the first Miss Shanghai beauty contest after the war. She is then kept as a mistress by a politician, who is unfortunately killed in a plane crash in 1948. In Book II she retreats to the countryside and soon returns as a neighborhood nurse to the fallen city in the 1950s. Associating with three men—a profligate son of the rich, a half-Russian loafer, and a photographer—she gives birth to a girl out of wedlock in 1961. Largely skipping the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Book III covers the decade after the political turmoil. The protagonist spends a simple life with her daughter and young admirers in the reviving city until her daughter gets married and leaves for the United States. With its thinly veiled allusions to Lady Yang Yuhuan’s (719-755) demise romanticized in Bo Juyi’s (772-846) oft-quoted poem “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” the story ends with Wang Qiyao’s violent death while protecting a box of gold bars left to her by the politician. The last thing she sees on her deathbed is the mise en scène of a bedroom murder that she watched forty years ago in a film studio. Miss Shanghai Wang Qiyao’s declining life from youth to old age can be understood synecdochically as Shanghai’s vicissitudes from the postwar to the post-revolutionary periods.

And for anyone interested in sampling this, a is available through Columbia’s site.

Korean author Ch’oe Yun’s consists of three stories, including the title one, which “explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule.”

Bill Marx of PRI’s The World and made this sound even more intriguing:

The World: Critics describe you as an experimental, post-modernist author, heavily influenced by Western literary influences. How have avant-garde techniques shaped your writing? In what ways have they not?

Ch’oe Yun: In each of the three works I took pains to apply the most appropriate form to the story’s world-view. I’ll grant you that this approach can appear experimental. I’ve never been one to agonize over technique, though. The notion of language and expression as constituting their own world-view is part and parcel of much of what I’ve read in Western literary thought and aesthetics.

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Another university press that deserves a lot of praise (and actually got some as well) is Syracuse University Press and their (American University at Cairo also deserves some special praise for all they’ve done in making Arabic works available to English readers, but I’ll write about them separately at another time.)

by Iranian author Taghi Modarressi was one of the most intriguing publications to come out from this series last year. Here’s their description:

Set around the time of the revolution, The Virgin of Solitude follows the parallel lives of a transplanted Austrian woman, who has made Iran her home, and her grandson, Nuri, who desperately misses his mother but hides his longing behind a veneer of teenage bravado. As the turmoil of the revolution envelops the country, grandmother and grandson witness the dissolution of social, class, and political order, while searching for a sense of belonging.

Also, was a book that we positively reviewed over the summer. On the Syracuse website you can find of editor Shakir Mustafa reading and answering questions, and an interview with the aforementioned Bill Marx.

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Although Mikhail Bulgakov’s wasn’t eligible for the Best Translated Book Award (we don’t consider retranslations), this is a good example of the fine work that’s going on at Yale University Press these days. And this year promises to be even more exciting, with the launch of the Margellos World Republic of Letters series and the publication of Can Xue’s novel

There are any number of other university presses deserving of attention—University of Nebraska and Northwestern are two others with a long history of publishing literature in translation—and this year we’ll do our best to review more of their books. In many ways, that’s what a site like Three Percent exists for . . .

The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. (Angola, Simon & Schuster)

Although this is the first (and only, at least so far) book of Agualusa’s to be published in the U.S., he has been making a name for himself and garnering lots of attention and praise from an international audience. Fellow fiction longlist member Antonio Lobo Antunes has called Agualusa, “Without doubt one of the most important Portuguese-language writers of his generation.” And in 2007 he won the

He now has two additional titles available in the UK from Arcadia, including Creole and the recently released My Father’s Wives. (A review of which will appear in an upcoming issue of Quarterly Conversation.)

Arcadia is also bringing out a fourth—_Estação das Chuvas_ or Rainy Season—and over at Book Trust, translator Daniel Hahn is currently (His posts range from addressing specific translation issues to the book’s jacket copy—the blog is worth checking out, and is updated on a weekly basis.)

In terms of this particular book, it’s necessary to point out right from the start that it’s narrated by a gecko. A gecko who lives with an albino book dealer and “seller of pasts” (the title can be literally translated as “The Genealogy Salesman”) who provides his clients—who are well-off and have a nice future ahead of them, but nothing special in their lineage—with a complete background.

For one of these clients, Felix Ventura doesn’t just create a past, but provides “Jose Buchmann” with a whole new identity, complete with stories of his mother and her death. Against Felix’s advice, Jose decides to look into this past of his, visiting his native home, etc.

This idea of reinvention ties nicely into the Borges quote that opens the novel:

If I were to be born again, I’d like to be something completely different. I’d quite like to be Norwegian. Or Persian, perhaps. Not Uruguayan, though—that’d feel too much like just moving down the street.

In the Simon & Schuster “Reading Group Guide,” Daniel Hahn asks Agualusa about the influence of Borges on the novel:

This book is a tribute to Borges. It’s a game that I hope Borges would have appreciated. At the same time, it’s also a sort of settling up of accounts. I love Borges as a writer, but think that as a man there was always something about him that was closed and obtuse, reactionary even, and he not infrequently expressed opinions that were misogynistic or racist. His relations with women were very complicated—it’s believe that he died a virgin. Now, in my book Borges is reincarnated in Luanda in the body of a gecko. The gecko’s memories correspond to fragments of Borges’s real life story. Somehow I wanted to give Borges a second chance—in my book he makes the most of his opportunities.

Not sure if the book is all that, but E.J. sums up some of the books qualities in his review:

The Book of Chameleons is not the kind of book that can be completely absorbed in a single reading, and Agualusa packs an impressive amount of narrative depth in the short volume. It’s a novel about writing that manages to not be distractingly metafictional, and it’s also a reflection on what the past means in a country that has been repeatedly wounded by war. That he is able to treat these ordinarily difficult subjects with such a deft touch, and so entertainingly, is a credit to his abilities as a writer.

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg. (Austria, New York Review Books)

is the second NYRB title on the fiction longlist (the other being Unforgiving Years) and the third Zweig title that they’ve published. The other two are which was the only novel Zweig published during his lifetime, and a new translation of which was sent to his publisher just before Zweig committed suicide.

Before the rise of Nazism, Zweig was an incredibly popular writer well known both for his novels and for his biographies. But as a Austrian Jew, he fled Austria for London, then lived in the United States and Brazil. It was in Petropolis that he and his wife committed joint suicide, stating “I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth.”

Edwin Frank’s monthly erudite letter about a recent NYRB book is by far my favorite publisher newsletter, and the month he wrote about The Post-Office Girl was no exception. (If you’re interested in receiving the NYRB newsletter, you can sign up )

Thanks to translator Joel Rotenberg, The Post-Office Girl is at last available in English. It’s no less striking than Beware of Pity and Chess Story, the two other Zweigs we’ve published, but it couldn’t be more different. It’s a book that should change how people think about Stefan Zweig.

The Post-Office Girl is fastpaced and hardboiled—as if Zweig, normally the most mannerly of writers, had fortified himself with some stiff shots of Dashiell Hammett. It’s the story of Christine, a nice girl from a poor provincial family who gets a taste of the good life only to have it snatched away; and of Ferdinand, an unemployed World War I veteran and ex-POW with whom she then links up. It’s a story, you could say, of two essentially respectable middle-class souls who wake up to find themselves miscast as outcasts, but what it’s really about, beyond economic and psychological collapse, is social death. Set during the period of devastating hyper-inflation that followed Austria’s defeat in 1918, Zweig’s novel depicts a country grotesquely divided between the rich and poor, so much so that it has effectively reverted to a state of nature. Christine and Ferdinand and Austria have been hollowed out (even if the country is still decked out in the pomp, circumstance, and pointless bureaucratic regulations of its bygone imperial heyday). They exist in a Hobbesian state of terminal desperation from which—the discovery arrives with mounting horror and excitement—the only hope of escape or redemption lies in violence.

What’s especially interesting about this publication is that the book never came out during Zweig’s life. It was written during the 30s, appeared to be finished, but was left untitled and wasn’t published until 1982. There’s no clear reason why he didn’t publish this during his lifetime. (although )

The first part of the book really does read like a fairy tale, as poor, diligent Christine is whisked away to spend some time with her very wealthy aunt and uncle. A sort of Cinderella story in which Christine gets to see a side of life she wasn’t even aware of, as when she first arrives to her room at the hotel:

The boy opens a door in the middle of the corrido, flourishes his cap, and steps aside. This must be her room. Christine goes in. But on the threshold she stops short, as though she were in the wrong place. Because with all the will in the world, the postal official from Klein-Reifling, accustomed to shabby surroundings, can’t just flick a switch are really believe that this room is for her, this extravagantly scaled, exquisitely bright, colorfully wallpapered room, with open French doors like crystalline floodgates, the light cascading through.

But like all fairy tales, the clock strikes midnight and she has to go back home. As Jeff Waxman explains in his review, this is when the book changes dramatically:

The vacation came to an abrupt end. As dreams do. Fräulein Christiane von Boolen was revealed to be, merely, Christine Hoeflehner and, in shame and anger, she returned to Klein-Reifling, to the small town she came from. With her mother dead and her memories of her time at the resort too vivid, Christine cannot sink back into her own life. This is the real meat of the story; this is the bitter Part Two. A spectre of discontent is introduced in Christine Hoeflehner and Zweig provides it a mate, Ferdinand Farrner. In Ferdinand, Christine finds a kindred spirit, an awareness of the unfairness of life. Together, they come to a precipice familiar to the poor. They can no longer stand. They jump.

Posthumous publishing decisions are always open to criticism (see review, or any of the comments about the decision to publish 2666 in one volume instead of five separate books), but nevertheless, this is a great book, quite different from his other works, and definitely worth reading.

Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck. (Israel, Ibis Editions)

I won’t be surprised if this post by someone in the “blogosphere”: Jewish-Arab relations and military actions is an intellectual powder keg. So before saying anything, I want to make it clear that this book—written from the point of view of an Israeli soldier involved in the takeover of Khirbet Khizeh and the evacuation of the Arabs living there—is on the longlist is on here for aesthetic reasons only. And for the quality of the prose and the translation.

That preface might not even be necessary . . . Khirbet Khizeh is considered a classic work, and although it has been the focus of many debates over the course of its history, what’s interesting is how it was received when first published in 1949, just months after the 1948 war:

Fifty-nine years ago, when “Khirbet Khizeh” was first published, it was not an expose of wartime misconduct. No expose was needed. In 1949, few Israelis were unaware that Arab villages had been forcibly evacuated. As historian Anita Shapira has shown in a brilliant essay on the novella’s reception from its publication until the 1990s, though “Khirbet Khizeh” was a best-seller in its first years, and though it was much discussed in newspapers and magazines, its veracity was hardly challenged and few questioned whether such an unpretty account of events should be published. When “Khirbet Khizeh” first came out, it was a rumination on something people knew to be true – how could they not? – and its aim was to clearly describe what had appeared vague in the fog of war and then the exaltation of victory: the moral muck inevitable in creating a Jewish majority in Palestine. This was the “Khirbet Khizeh” that was added to the high school curriculum. [from Noah Efron’s review in ]

As mentioned in brief above, this short novella is about the violent expulsion of the Palestine villagers by Israeli soldiers acting under orders. The hatred the Jewish soldiers express about the Arabs, the fact that they’re doing this because “they were ordered,” the callous, unforgiving behavior, allows one to make parallels between this situation and other wars/conflicts. And even in the abstract, this base violence toward “the other” is universal, and the book illustrates as much about human nature as it does about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

And for all the beautiful descriptions of Khirbet Khizeh, there are passages that are tough to swallow, that force the reader to see the worst parts of war. From a section after the village is secured and all the inhabitants are being loaded up and sent off:

“They’re just like animals,” Yehuda explained to us, but we did not reply.

The women were gathered onto another truck, and they began to scream and weep, and no one envied those who had to look after them. [. . .]

We felt a mood of beggary, pus, and leprosy, and all that was lacking was the sound of dirges and charity saveth from death.

“Ugh, revolting!” said Shlomo.

“Better they should die!” said Yehuda.

“How many blind people and cripples do they have in this village!” said Shlomo.

Not always so explicit, these sorts of sentiments run throughout the novella and make this a bit hard to read. One of the things that complicates, and elevates, this novel is the main character’s interior reaction to these events, which isn’t always straight down the party line:

But not this . . . not this . . . something was still unclear. Just a kind of bad feeling. Like being forced into a nightmare and not being allowed to wake up from it. You’re caught up with several voices. You don’t know what. Maybe the answer is to stand up and resist? But maybe, the opposite, to see and be and feel . . .

Or:

My guts cried out. Colonizers, they shouted. Lies, my guts shouted. Khirbet Khizeh is not ours. The Spandau gun never gave us any rights. Oh, my guts screamed. What hadn’t they told us about refugees. Everything, everything was for the refugees, their welfare, their rescue—our refugees, naturally. Those we were driving out—that was a totally different matter. Wait. Two thousand years of exile. The whole story. Jews being killed. Europe. We were masters now.

But as David Shulman writes in his afterword, “this story is in fact far from being moralistic, utterly remote from preaching and pontification.” And maybe that’s what’s made it such a lasting book, one that’s prompted a lot of discussion and debate, as great books should.

S. Yizhar—the pen name for Yizhar Smilansky—passed away rather recently (2006), was a longtime member of Knesset, and in addition to Khirbet Khizeh, is known for his 1,156-page magnum opus, Days of Tziklag. (Which hasn’t been translated into English.)

It’s unfortunate that doesn’t get more attention from American reviewers and publications. They’re doing some very interesting books, and personally, I like the simple, unadorned style and feel of this title. We’ll make a special effort to review more of their books for Three Percent in the upcoming months. But for now, if you can get your hands on it, Khirbet Khizeh is worth checking out.

Voice Over by Celine Curiol, translated from the French by Sam Richard. (France, Seven Stories)

Voice Over is a mesmerizing book. So well-done that it’s almost shocking that this is a debut novel from a writer still in her 30s. It was selected as a “French Voices” title (a program designed to highlight the best of contemporary French literature) and found a big fan in Paul Auster.

To some readers, this will seem like a typical French book—it centers around infidelity, and it seems like a book in which nothing really happens. Auster does a great job describing this novel in his introduction:

Voice Over is a story of obsession, alienation, and a descent into near madness. The central character, who works as a public address announcer at the Gare du Nord, falls for a man who is attached to another woman. Slowly and inexorably, something begins to happen between them—or almost. Such is the not so terribly complex plot of this deeply complex novel. Meanwhile, hundreds of events, both large and small, are recounted as Curiol’s damaged and poignant heroine goes about her life, which is filled with numerous random encounters with people as diverse as a female impersonator named Renee Risque, a forlorn African immigrant, a photographer with the delicious name of Olivier Chedubarum, and an actress who happens to have the same name she does.

It’s Curiol’s ability to, again cribbing from Auster, put “the reader both inside and outside at the same time” that makes this such a powerful book. We’re privy to the main characters thoughts, desires, and hopes, but also can see her as others do (a number of characters refer to her as “strange” or “weird” at one point or another), as she somewhat awkwardly—in a way can make the reader more than a bit anxious on her behalf—goes through life. This was one of those books where I actively empathized with the protagonist, secretly wishing things would work out for the best. It’s a very different book from, say, Toussaint’s Camera, another French title on the longlist, but one in which the character’s struggles are quite amusing, as are the very odd twists and turns of his mind. Instead, there’s a palpably feeling of despair and discomfort throughout Voice Over, that is quite affective.

For example, here’s a section from a dinner party she attends at the house of the man she’s fallen for:

She sees the hand of the man wit the stoop reaching out for her plate, on which some tiny puddles of a rich, dark sauce remain. Or did you want to mop up with some bread? Without waiting for her to reply, he whisks her plate away. She wonders whether to pretend to laugh or reward him for his effort. No thank you, she replies politely. She notices the table is being cleared; he hasn’t looked at her since that wink in the kitchen. Ange gets up with the pile of plates, he follows her out. With the couple momentarily gone, the delicately-spun bonds among the guests start to fray. The two husbands lower their voices and turn to their wives; the two bachelors slowly light cigarettes; for a few moments, everyone abandons his or her social role, enjoys a well-deserved mid-performance break. For a brief instant, she fears giving in to the physical urge to rush out the door. That damn silence is starting to get to her. They’re acting in a seven-man locked room drama, and it feels as if she’s the last dead woman who has yet to grasp the rules of hell. She pours herself another glass of red wine, which she forces herself to sip for appearances’ sake. Someone decides to open another bottle to put everyone a bit more at ease. Since they all know each other already and she is acquainted only with the hosts, she senses there will be no escape: she is in for a full-blown interrogation. With everybody listening religiously as though her life were somehow thrilling. And sure enough, the guy with the stoop makes an exceptional effort and asks her what she does for a living. By chance, the question falls during a lull in the conversation, and the entire group feels invited to stick their noses in: the six others wait for the rather unassuming girl at the end of the table to speak up; damn it, it’s about time she contributed a bit more to the discussion.

How she answers this question—she definitely doesn’t tell them that she makes announcements about the train schedule—sets a number of subplots in motion that are both funny, and a bit seedy. (It’s too difficult to explain this in full, but the real end of this subplot happens in a conversation with her somewhat lover and is a perfect example of the discrepancy between how others see her, and how the reader does.)

I’m really glad that this book made the longlist, and completely agree with Auster’s conclusion: “Take note. A superb new writer lives among us.”