Lenz is a skilled surgeon, who does not operate out of compassion or to save lives, but because he is good at being a surgeon, and it is simply a side effect of his competent practice that lives are saved. Lenz regularly invites beggars into his home, with the implied promise of food or money, and then drags out their stay, demeaning them in conversation and having sex with his wife in front of them. But at his brother’s funeral—the brother that is his opposite in many ways—Lenz witnesses the influence that public figures hold, a renown and regard that even as a celebrated surgeon he could never possess. And so begins his foray into politics.

As a character, Lenz is unsympathetic and sympathetic at the same time. In his treatment of his wife, in particular, he can be described as monstrous. In his determination to create a rational system of perception and action, in his complete subservience to the memory and ideology of his father, he is understandable. Perhaps the most incomprehensible character however is his wife, Maria Buchmann. It is hard to understand who would marry a man like Lenz, or why even he would want to marry. But she does not play a very large role in the book, and dies about halfway through, to the benefit of Lenz’s political career.

Tavares does not mince words in this novel. His style is severe and technical. It appears to mirror the mental processes of Lenz himself, ruthlessly rational, but as the book progresses, the style seems to convey more of a sense of scrutiny. It is a mockery of itself, a meta-commentary on its own insufficiency, as we simultaneously see Buchmann himself degenerate from illness.

To elaborate, take first that Lenz often likens himself to a hunter, who remains calm and collected while instilling a hysterical fear in his prey:

A good hunter proceeds in this way, and with just two or three of his well-placed steps in the middle of the forest he will be able to instill the second year in the fleeing hare, the decisive fear. And it will be out of this par that the hare will really begin to hurry, to race off at full speed, but a speed without order or objective, recalling those little mice locked in cages that run inside of wheels, turning them with their feet; movements that are very quick indeed, but in a category of motion that might be described as the speed of someone just trying to keep going, so different from the speed of someone who wants to advance.

It was only when—in his role as hunter—he realized that he could strike this second fear into the hare that Lenz Buchmann became completely convinced that the animal would not escape him. His many years’ hunting had taught him that this second terror—unlike the first—has only detrimental effects for the quarry: it is illogical, almost suicidal. The first fear, being instinctive, makes the quarry flee in a direction away from the hunter—any intelligent living creature would do that. The second fear, however, once it invades the organism being pursued, completely disorders the strategic system that all living creatures have, and can bring the quarry around in a circular route ending up—stupidly—five meters from the hunter’s weapon.

For Lenz, a technician, prey is marked by illogicality, which is a stupidity. As he comes down with cancer, and slowly his faculties begin to go, until all he is able to do is hold a piece of paper on which his father’s name is written and read it over and over again, Tavares does not loosen his prose. We see it clearly when spittle drips down Lenz’s face. He cannot kill himself because he has let himself get too far gone, and Tavares’ prose stands strong as a reminder of the irrational hyper-rationality that fueled Lenz’s ambition, his frightened flight from insignificance, which brings about his demise.

Here’s the opening of Lily’s review:

In the very first scene of this book, a young Lenz Buchmann is instructed by his father to “do” a young servant girl in front of him. The command is issued without qualification, and there is no recourse for Lenz except to follow it. From this incident onward the novel spins forth a philosophy of strength, of power, of competence, of morality, or the lack thereof, that is alienating to say the least.

Lenz is a skilled surgeon, who does not operate out of compassion or to save lives, but because he is good at being a surgeon, and it is simply a side effect of his competent practice that lives are saved. Lenz regularly invites beggars into his home, with the implied promise of food or money, and then drags out their stay, demeaning them in conversation and having sex with his wife in front of them. But at his brother’s funeral—the brother that is his opposite in many ways—Lenz witnesses the influence that public figures hold, a renown and regard that even as a celebrated surgeon he could never possess. And so begins his foray into politics.

As a character, Lenz is unsympathetic and sympathetic at the same time. In his treatment of his wife, in particular, he can be described as monstrous. In his determination to create a rational system of perception and action, in his complete subservience to the memory and ideology of his father, he is understandable. Perhaps the most incomprehensible character however is his wife, Maria Buchmann. It is hard to understand who would marry a man like Lenz, or why even he would want to marry. But she does not play a very large role in the book, and dies about halfway through, to the benefit of Lenz’s political career.

Click here for the complete review, and click to read an extended preview of the book.

Lily Ye: In Learning to Pray, the tone of the book seemed to me to be very severe, perhaps in reflection of the personality of the protagonist, Lenz Buchmann. Would you agree with this assessment, both in your translation and in the original, and how did it affect the process of translation? That is, how did you find translating this particular style of writing?

Daniel Hahn: Yes, it’s severe—it’s very chilly and cynical, and generally I think a pretty bleak place to be. There’s one sense in which this made it a difficult translation job (though not in the sense meant by your question, I think)—when you translate a book you live in it much more intensely, and naturally for a much longer period, than if you’re simply strolling through it once as a reader, and when a book is sown through with views as toxic as those found here, it doesn’t make it an altogether pleasant place to be living. That said, he’s a brilliant writer, and translating brilliant writing is always more enjoyable than translating mediocre writing, unsurprisingly.

Your question I guess is more to do with style, though, and that was certainly difficult to get right. It’s one of the hardest books I’ve worked on in terms of making sense of the structure of complicated sentences, sometimes very imprecise and sometimes very sharp-focus; this also meant that it benefited from a pretty significant edit once I was done, from a rigorous editor who approached it simply as an English-language reader—the result, I think, might be pulling away from my draft and producing something a little smoother for English-language readers.

You can read the entire interview

E.J. wrote about Tavares a couple years back when he won the Portugal Telecom Prize for Jerusalem. He included this bit about the “Neighborhood” books, which really should be available to English readers:

We found out about Tavares at Frankfurt and got our hands on a few of his “Neighborhood” books—some of which have been translated into English by TransBooks in India (What kind of audience is there is in India for Portuguese translations . . . into English?). Each book in the series is a small collection of short stories inspired by literary and artistic figures. The ones we have in English are Mister Brecht, Mister Valéry, Mister Henri, and Mister Juarroz. It appears that the neighborhood—represented in an illustration on the back of the books by a sketch of a set of buildings with arrows telling you which building, and which window, each person lives in—is ever expanding, but so far includes, among others, Calvino, Kafka, Walser, and Woolf.

They’re incredible little books, and the stories remind me a lot of Augosto Monterroso’s. For the most part the stories are very short—some are only a few lines long—and fable-like, and some of the stories feature the writer/artist as main characters.

came out from Dalkey in the fall of 2009 in Anna Kushner’s translation to a lot of great attention. It’s great that they’re also doing Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique, which, as mentioned above is translated by Daniel Hahn.

Daniel is a great translator who I had the chance to meet at the Salzburg Global Seminar on translation a few years ago. He’s most well-known as a translator for his work on Jose Agualusa, and is currently an interim co-director (with fellow Salzburg alum Kate Griffin) of the British Centre for Literary Translation in East Anglia.

Later this week we’ll be posting an interview with Daniel, but for now, you can which is described below:

In a city not quite of any particular era, a distant and calculating man named Lenz Buchmann works as a surgeon, treating his patients as little more than equations to be solved: life and death no more than results to be worked through without the least compassion. Soon, however, Buchmann’s ambition is no longer content with medicine, and he finds himself rising through the ranks of his country’s ruling party . . . until a diagnosis transforms this likely future president from a leading player into just another victim. In language that is at once precise, clinical, and oddly childlike, Gonçalo M. Tavares—the Portuguese novelist hailed by José Saramago as the greatest of his generation—here brings us another chilling investigation into the limits of human experience, mapping the creation and then disintegration of a man we might call “evil,” and showing us how he must learn to adapt in a world he can no longer dominate.